BetterCall Legal Search
A live German legal-search product and the supporting connector work that makes official German and UK legal material usable in careful, source-linked agent workflows.
What it helps with
People usually begin legal research with an everyday question, while the source material is organised around jurisdictions, documents, versions, and exact sections. The work behind BetterCall explores how to bridge that gap without hiding the legal source or presenting retrieved text as professional advice.
What was built
For German law, the project imports and parses official legal texts, preserves their section identity and metadata, and makes them available through exact lookup, search, an API, command-line tools, and agent connections. BetterCall turns that foundation into a live plain-language search interface with clickable cited passages and a separate compliance-check route. For UK research, a companion integration packages setup and query guidance around the government’s experimental Lex service and its 19 tools; it clearly credits that public service rather than claiming ownership of its data.
What made it different
Keeping the connector work inside this case shows two responsible approaches. German material needed a structured source store before it could support a useful public search product. The UK already had an experimental public service, so the better contribution was a careful adapter with practical guidance and visible limits. In both cases, a human can inspect the source and see where the tool must stop.
Legal-data connectors behind the work
German Legal-data Connector
An importer, parser, store, search API, command-line tool, and agent connector for official German legal texts.
The connector preserves exact sections, document identity, version, source, and jurisdiction while making the same structured material available through search, an API, command-line tools, and agent workflows. It provides the source foundation behind BetterCall without claiming that retrieval proves a legal conclusion or that the collection is independently complete.
UK Legal-data Connector
A practical adapter and setup guide for using the UK government’s experimental Lex API as tools inside an agent workflow.
The integration packages setup, configuration, and query guidance for the public service’s 19 legislation, case-law, amendment, and note tools. It credits the government service underneath it, carries its experimental limits into the workflow, and warns that older machine-produced transcriptions still need human verification.
View the connector source →Legal tools need a clear path back to the source and an honest account of who built the underlying data service. A citation still does not turn an answer into legal advice.
What it demonstrates
- Plain-language German legal search with cited passages
- Structured German legal ingestion and exact-section retrieval
- UK government Lex service setup and agent integration