From question to citation trail in seconds.
Silex maps your legal question through Switzerland's three-tier legal hierarchy: federal statute, Federal Tribunal decision, and relevant cantonal precedent. Every step is linked to its official source.
Three steps from question to cited answer.
The Silex engine resolves your question against structured Swiss legal data. You receive a traceable answer, not a best guess.
Pose your question in natural language
Write the legal question as you would ask a colleague. German, French, and Italian are all supported. No special query syntax required.
Silex locates the controlling norm
The engine identifies which federal statute governs the situation, which BGer decisions have applied it, and where cantonal courts have addressed the same question in your jurisdiction.
Receive a structured citation trail
You get the full hierarchy: statute, then the federal decision that interpreted it, then the cantonal decision that applied that interpretation. Each node links directly to the authoritative source document.
Identifying the controlling norm
Most Swiss legal questions have an obvious controlling statute once you know the hierarchy. But the hierarchy is not always obvious: a question touching tenancy law could implicate OR Art. 253 at the federal level, a cantonal implementing ordinance, and one of several BGer decisions that limited that ordinance's scope. Silex resolves that ambiguity before returning any result.
The engine maps your question against a structured index of SR numbers, common legal domains, and the doctrinal categories Swiss courts apply. This is not keyword matching. It is norm resolution against a structured dataset maintained by our legal research team.
Query domain: Tenancy law, verbal agreement
Surfacing the BGer decision chain
Federal Tribunal decisions are the authoritative interpretation of federal law. But the BGer has issued thousands of decisions per year since the court's reorganisation in 2007, and the officially published BGE series covers only a fraction. Silex indexes both the published BGE series and the unpublished BGer rulings that practitioners regularly need but rarely find.
The result returned is not just a matching document but a chain: the leading decision, subsequent decisions that applied or distinguished it, and any recent shift in the court's approach. You see the doctrinal arc, not just a single ruling.
BGer chain: OR Art. 253 form requirements
Aggregating cantonal precedent
Switzerland has 26 cantonal court hierarchies. Each publishes decisions differently. Some publish them fully online; others require subscribing to a regional legal database or contacting the court directly. Silex aggregates across all 26.
How cantonal indexing works
Our legal research team maintains direct partnerships with cantonal court registries and regional legal publishers. Decisions are ingested, normalised against the relevant federal norm, and indexed with source metadata before becoming searchable.
- All 26 cantons indexed, including German, French, and Italian jurisdiction courts
- Decisions linked back to the federal norm they applied or interpreted
- Source metadata preserved: court, date, reference number, publication status
Every citation is source-verified before it reaches you.
Silex does not generate plausible-sounding citations. Every reference in a Silex answer resolves to a document in our verified source index before being returned.
Verified source index
We ingest directly from fedlex.admin.ch for federal statutes, the official BGE/BGer databases for federal decisions, and verified cantonal sources for cantonal precedent. Nothing is generated from training data.
Rejected if unverifiable
If a potentially relevant norm or decision is not in our verified index, Silex does not include it in the answer. We would rather return a narrower, accurate result than a broader, uncertain one.
Traceable to the document
Every node in a Silex citation trail carries a direct link to the source document at its official URL. You can follow any citation through to the full text, not just the abstract.
Updated incrementally
Our indexing pipeline runs continuously. Federal statute amendments take effect in our index within 48 hours of fedlex publication. New BGer decisions are indexed weekly.
See it work on your own legal question.
The free plan gives you 10 queries per month covering federal statutes and BGer decisions. No credit card required to start.
Federal law coverage available on the free plan.