Built in Zurich to fix Swiss legal research.
Silex Legal was founded in 2024 by a lawyer and an engineer who both spent years frustrated by the same problem: Swiss legal research requires tracking a three-tier hierarchy across 26 cantonal jurisdictions, and no tool managed it accurately.
The problem with Swiss legal research.
Swiss law operates at three tiers: federal statute, Federal Tribunal decision, and cantonal court precedent. Each tier is authoritative. Each is maintained in a separate system. Finding the complete picture for any legal question requires navigating all three.
The federal level is well-documented but incomplete
Federal statutes are fully published at fedlex.admin.ch. The published BGE series is accessible online. But the Federal Tribunal issues thousands of decisions per year and only a fraction enter the BGE series. The unpublished BGer rulings that practitioners regularly need are scattered across the court's own search interface.
Cantonal precedent is fragmented across 26 systems
Switzerland has 26 cantonal court hierarchies, each with its own publication practices. Some cantons publish decisions fully online; others require a subscription to a regional legal database; a few require contacting the court registry directly. No single tool aggregated across all 26 before Silex.
Human-maintained sources. Machine-verified citations.
Silex does not generate plausible-looking citations from a language model and hope they are real. We index from authoritative sources, maintain the index with human legal researchers, and only return a citation that exists in our verified database.
Source-first indexing
We ingest directly from fedlex.admin.ch, the Federal Tribunal's public databases, and verified cantonal sources. Nothing enters the index without a source document we can link to.
Legal research team
Our in-house team of Swiss-trained legal researchers reviews cantonal source quality, monitors fedlex for updates, and maintains the doctrinal categorisation that makes cross-tier search accurate.
Rejection over hallucination
If a potentially relevant decision is not in our verified index, Silex does not include it. We return a narrower accurate result rather than a broader uncertain one.
Traceable to source
Every citation in every Silex answer links directly to its source document at the official URL. You can follow any citation through to the full text, not just the abstract.
Three people, one focused problem.
Silex is a small team. We stay small deliberately: it keeps the work close to the problem and the product honest.
Kyriaki Bongard
CEO, Co-Founder
Kyriaki spent years doing Swiss statutory research and cross-cantonal citation tracing before founding Silex. The recurring difficulty was not understanding the law but navigating the fragmented research infrastructure: federal statutes, BGer decisions, and cantonal precedent each maintained in separate systems with no unified traversal path. That practical frustration became Silex's product roadmap.
Isabelle Perret
Head of Legal Research
Isabelle leads the legal research team that maintains Silex's source index quality. She brings years of experience in French-language Swiss legal documentation, with a focus on citation standardisation across the OR and ZPO. Before Silex she worked at a Francophone Swiss legal publisher where the core problem was the same one Silex is solving: Swiss legal databases that did not talk to each other.
Lukas Meier
Lead Engineer, Co-Founder
Lukas built the indexing pipeline and citation resolution engine that sits at the core of Silex. His background is in structured data search and the normalisation of heterogeneous text corpora across multiple languages into a queryable graph. The particular challenge with Swiss legal text is that the three official language versions of a statute are legally co-equal, not translations of each other: the indexing has to treat them accordingly.
Three things we will not compromise on.
Citation accuracy over recall
We return fewer results rather than uncertain ones. A lawyer citing a decision needs to know it is real, it says what we say it says, and it can be verified. We are willing to miss edge cases to never return a fabricated citation.
Swiss legal specificity
We are not building a general legal search tool. Silex is specifically built for Switzerland's three-tier legal system, the SR numbering system, and the German, French, and Italian versions of statutes as legally equal official texts. Generalist tools handle none of this correctly.
Get in touch.
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