Legal research · Zurich

Every legal answer cites something. Almost none of them can prove it holds.

Lawrider builds legal research systems where grounding is a measured number, logged on every answer, not a promise in a brochure.

What it is

A research engine, not a chat wrapper

Ask a legal question and a language model will answer in fluent prose, cite an article, and sound certain. What it cannot tell you is whether that article says what the answer claims, or whether it was even in force on the date in question.

Lawrider is the Swiss company behind a legal research platform that has run in production since February 2026. Retrieval runs over primary sources, and every answer passes a chain of deterministic checks before a person reads it: citation validity, quote grounding, norm attribution, precedent status. Of nine such checks, exactly one calls a language model. The rest are database and graph queries, which is why their verdicts are reproducible.

Court decisions in the corpus	172,000,000+
Jurisdictions	21 countries, plus ECtHR and CJEU
Citation graph	330,000,000 edges
In production since	February 2026
Swiss court decisions, full text	1,218,989
Swiss federal acts in force, full text	5,075 of 5,075
Swiss consolidated versions, with in-force intervals	37,607
Citation links extracted from Swiss decisions	26,600,000+
Tool calls against the corpus, Jun–Aug 2026	2,050

Swiss federal law is held in full: every act in force, in German, French and Italian, as 37,607 consolidated versions with their in-force intervals, 1.76 million articles in all. Court decisions come from every federal and cantonal court that publishes, updated nightly. We would rather state the scope than imply a finished cross-border product. Every figure on this page was counted on the production database on 26 August 2026.

Data

Swiss litigation and legislation, measured over time

The Swiss corpus is rebuilt from its sources, entscheidsuche.ch for court decisions and Fedlex for federal law, and refreshed every night. Two things matter for research: that the decisions reach back far enough to show how a line of case law formed, and that every act can be read as it stood on a given date.

1,218,989 Swiss court decisions with clean full text, by year of decision: 474,809 from federal courts (the Federal Supreme Court and its published BGE/ATF, the Federal Administrative, Criminal and Patent Courts) and 744,180 from cantonal courts. The series starts in 1875; it is shown from 2000, when publication became systematic. A further 133,546 decisions are published by the source without a date and are left out of the chart, not out of the corpus. 2026 is the year to date.

The same decisions by court of origin. All 26 cantons are present; the count reflects what each canton publishes, not what it decides. Texts are held in German, French and Italian, as the courts issued them, and 26.6 million citation links have been extracted from them: 8.95 million to other decisions, 17.7 million to articles of federal law.

Evidence

We publish the measurements, including the unflattering ones

Trustworthiness is not a claim we make about our system. It is a quantity we compute on every request and log. Over the last thirty days the grounding score averaged 93 out of 100. When it moves, we say so.

The same discipline runs through our research. Two papers, both on the gap between a citation and a verifiable one:

arXiv:2606.00898Citation grounding measures the oracle: the same 500 answers score 13 to 21 per cent hallucinated citations against a sparse citation graph and under one per cent against the rebuilt one; not one flagged citation was a fabrication.
arXiv:2605.17639Twenty years, 396 million citations: co-citation predictability decays by 33 to 47 per cent, which quietly breaks precedent retrieval that relies on similarity alone.

Current work

Point-in-Time Swiss Law

A statutory article is not one document. Article 336 of the Code of Obligations in 2015 and in 2026 are different texts under the same identifier. Fedlex publishes every consolidated version with its in-force dates; a corpus scraped from the web keeps one snapshot and throws the interval away. A model trained on it will state repealed law with total confidence, and nothing in the output marks it as dead.

Consolidated versions of Swiss federal acts entering into force, per year, counted from the versions Fedlex publishes in machine-readable form: 37,607 versions of 17,293 acts, in German, French and Italian each. Complete from 2020; for earlier years Fedlex has digitised only part of the historical versions, which is why the series ramps. 2026 is the year to date; 117 versions are already scheduled for 2027 and later.

Code of Obligations (SR 220): every consolidated version since 2021 and the interval it was in force

Fourteen versions of one act in under six years, several of them valid for a few weeks. Ask for Article 336 on any date and the system returns the text in force that day, taken from the version whose interval contains it, not the latest one.

Can we return the text as it stood on a given date?

Date	Acts in force today that already existed	With the version valid that day	Share
2000-01-01	2,365	1,371	58%
2005-01-01	2,775	1,612	58%
2010-01-01	3,395	2,023	60%
2015-01-01	4,018	2,781	69%
2020-01-01	4,618	3,991	86%
2021-01-01	4,715	4,711	99.9%
2023-01-01	4,934	4,931	99.9%
2025-01-01	5,070	5,051	99.6%
2026-08-26	5,075	5,049	99.5%

Measured against every federal act in force today. For any date from 2021 onwards we hold the exact version for 99.5 per cent of them or more; going back, coverage falls to the share of historical versions Fedlex has published in machine-readable form. That ceiling belongs to the source, and we state it rather than fill it from scraped web pages.

Ingest. Done. Every consolidated version Fedlex publishes in machine-readable form, in German, French and Italian, with source, licence, amending act and in-force interval recorded at ingest: 37,607 versions of 17,293 acts.
Diff. Done. Consecutive versions compared into a machine-readable amendment ledger, so any text can be traced to what it superseded and when: roughly 25,000 article-level changes per language so far.
Measure. Done. CH-PiT: 15,000 dated questions in German, French and Italian and a deterministic scorer for one question: was the answer grounded in the version of the article valid on the date asked? Scorer, runners and every model answer are public.

Without point-in-time retrieval, frontier models score close to zero on the questions where today's wording is not the answer; given the point-in-time tools, the same models reach 90–95%. Dataset: overthelex/ch-pit, code and results: github.com/overthelex/ch-pit.

MCP access

The Swiss corpus, inside your AI assistant

The production database is exposed as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP-capable assistants can query it directly: full-text search over 1.2 million Swiss court decisions, the full text of any decision, the citation graph, and every federal act as it stood on any given date. Twelve tools, all read-only, all answering from the same database the figures on this page were counted on.

A worked example: give the assistant a docket number such as 4A_299/2013 and it resolves the decision, loads its full text, lists every act the court cited — each in the consolidated version in force on the day of the decision — and can then read those versions article by article. It is the point-in-time guarantees above that make that last step honest.

Endpoint	`https://mcp.lawrider.ch/v2/mcp`
Protocol	MCP over Streamable HTTP, Bearer key
Tools	12, Swiss corpus only, read-only

Access is by request. Write to [email protected] from your professional address, with a line on who you are and what you want to look up; we reply with a key and the connection instructions for your client. The access policy is the one stated below: legal professionals, in-house teams and academic researchers.

Beyond Switzerland

The same database holds 22 further jurisdictions

Switzerland is the product. The other corpora sit on the same production database as searchable primary sources, ingested with the same discipline, and are what the cross-border figures above refer to. Court decisions per jurisdiction, exact counts, on a logarithmic scale:

Ukraine is the second full product, with its own tool surface and the 330-million-edge citation graph. The rest is data, held and measured, and we say so rather than count it as coverage.

Legislation with version history, beyond Switzerland

Jurisdiction	Acts	Versions	Articles or provisions
Ukraine	293,049	439,060	2,208,156
United Kingdom	158,317	254,814	1,262,603
Poland	164,213	164,206	5,546,084
Netherlands	46,365	146,164	9,012,864
European Union (EUR-Lex)	46,020	–	–
Spain (BOE)	12,228	–	–
United Arab Emirates	2,862	–	23,669

The United Kingdom additionally carries 1,213,289 recorded amendment effects from legislation.gov.uk. Where a cell is empty, the source publishes a single consolidated text without version history.

Contact

Talk to us

We are most useful to people who already suspect that an AI answer about law needs checking, and want a number for how often it fails.

Lawrider is built for legal professionals, in-house teams and academic researchers. Access is restricted to verified users. It is not offered to the general public or to litigants in person, and it does not provide legal advice.

Email[email protected]

Based inZurich, Switzerland

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