Consultant Plus () is a cross-platform legal reference system developed in Russia. Initially, the development of the system was carried out by the Scientific and Production Association Computational Mathematics and Informatics (NPO VMI), which was responsible for the development of the Garant (Legal Reference System) system. The first version of the system was released in 1992. Consultant's centralized database is updated daily. It is distributed via a network of partners.
Its major competitors are Garant and Codex and Techexpert, both proprietary.
On the official website, the developer provides the opportunity to work with a non-commercial online version, an abbreviated version of commercial systems. ConsultantPlus annually releases limited free versions of its system for universities, schools, etc. (until the fall of 2019, the disks "Higher School" and "Secondary School", starting in the fall of 2019. The online version of ConsultantPlus: Student and the free archive of ConsultantPlus: Secondary School). The documentation supplied with these versions is often improperly called a textbook (for example, "Introduction to Legal Informatics"), but it only serves to teach the user how to work with the interfaces of a specific program "ConsultantPlus".
It is distributed through a network of regional information centers.
The full federal law database includes over 3 million documents; regional acts are distributed in a separate database with over 4 million documents.
The information contained in the system is structured into several notions, including:
Every class mentioned above consists of several information banks to simplify the search throughout the database by manually excluding the classes and banks inappropriate for each current search.
The database includes: