The legal AI market got a central thing wrong: it optimized almost entirely for US law and treated German as a language variant of English law. General-purpose tools parsed contracts under Delaware assumptions and searched US federal circuits and the Supreme Court. An attorney handling a Werkvertrag dispute under §631 BGB, an Austrian commercial lease under the MRG, or a GmbH share purchase agreement governed by German law was working around the software, not with it. Alawyer began with that gap.
We heard the same failure from German and Austrian practitioners. They tested a general-purpose legal AI tool, saw it cite a US case or apply a US statutory framework to a German-law question, and concluded that the whole category was premature. That reaction makes sense when software cannot distinguish a Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung from a Delaware LLC, or the BGH's treatment of limitation-of-liability clauses under AGB-Recht from a US court's reading of an indemnification cap.
What DACH Firms Need from Legal AI
German and Austrian practice calls for more than a German-language interface. The core case law is German: BGH (Bundesgerichtshof), BAG (Bundesarbeitsgericht), BVerwG (Bundesverwaltungsgericht), and OGH (Oberste Gerichtshof) in Austria. A tool trained mainly on English-language decisions will struggle with this corpus, whatever its general language ability. Legal German has doctrinal vocabulary that becomes meaningful only through deep exposure to the relevant texts.
Contract drafting in DACH commercial practice also rests on a different structure. German commercial contracts are often shorter and depend more heavily on statutory defaults in the background, including BGB and HGB. Anglo-American contracts tend to disclaim those defaults expressly. Clause analysis calibrated to Anglo-American patterns may therefore mark ordinary German formulations as unusually brief or incomplete, simply because it cannot account for what the statute already supplies.
The ABGB (Allgemeines Burgerliches Gesetzbuch) and the BGB are related codifications, not interchangeable ones. An attorney in Vienna reviewing an Austrian commercial contract needs a tool that understands OGH doctrine on particular ABGB provisions, rather than loosely extending BGB defaults to Austria. The clearest differences appear in tenancy law (MRG), employment law (AngG versus BGB), and contract interpretation, including good faith under §1295 ABGB versus §242 BGB.
What Alawyer Does in Version One
Alawyer's first version does two things. It offers natural language case law search across the BGH and OGH corpora, tuned to German-language legal text. An attorney describes the facts and legal issue in ordinary German prose, and the system retrieves decisions relevant in meaning, without requiring a known BGH filing reference or the court's exact terminology.
It also performs clause analysis on contracts in German and Austrian commercial law contexts. The attorney supplies a PDF or DOCX and selects the practice area. The result is a clause-by-clause review showing which clause types appear, which depart from the norm for that contract type and jurisdiction, and which structural features merit closer attention.
The supported formats are currently single-document PDF and DOCX. Configured practice areas include supply agreements, distribution agreements, service agreements (Dienstvertrage and Werkvertrage), GmbH shareholder agreements, commercial leases, and standard employment agreements under German or Austrian law. We will add further contract types only as we validate extraction quality in them.
What Alawyer Does Not Do
Alawyer does not give legal advice, decide whether a clause suits a client's situation, recommend a negotiating position, or draft contracts. Those functions are intentionally outside the product's scope, rather than items on a future-version list. Each requires the attorney to apply legal judgment to a particular client, set of facts, and risk profile.
Our role is to shorten the path from receiving a document to understanding its contents. The attorney decides what that understanding means for the matter. We make that division explicit because it matters to how practitioners should use the product.
Who We Are
We are three people based in Graz. I am Wolfgang Deutschmann, CEO. Before co-founding Alawyer, I spent years in legal process consulting for German-speaking commercial law firms, where I saw senior associates spend days on review work software could speed up. The inefficiency was obvious. What was missing was software calibrated to the jurisdiction and document corpus.
Tobias Brandt, CTO, builds NLP pipelines for legal and regulatory document corpora. He brings deep experience in German-language model fine-tuning and is responsible for extraction accuracy in clause analysis. That work reflects the differences between German legal text and general German prose that matter when a system has to identify provisions reliably.
Sophia Kessler, Lead Legal Advisor, is a trained attorney with practice in Austrian and German commercial law. She reviews every AI output methodology before it reaches users. She is also the person who tells Tobias when an extraction result is technically correct but legally wrong. That exchange keeps the product grounded in legal practice, not just polished for demonstrations.
We are bootstrapped. We built the first version with our own time and resources because we believed the problem was real and the tools available to DACH attorneys were inadequate. Our size forces selectivity. We are not trying to solve all of legal work. We are focused on the research and analysis bottleneck for German and Austrian commercial law practitioners, with a scope intended to be useful in practice rather than merely possible in theory.
What We Ask of You
If you work at a German or Austrian law firm and recognize these problems, the trial is free and takes 90 seconds to produce a first result on a real document. Tell us what you find, especially what the system misses or gets wrong. Early practitioner feedback is the most valuable feedback we can receive. Wolfgang reads every message sent through the contact form and responds personally.
Alawyer is not finished. Version one does two things for a defined group of contract types and jurisdictions, and it does not cover every use case. Some contract types have not yet been validated for clause analysis. We will state the scope of each release plainly, because overstating capability may bring sign-ups but will disappoint practitioners. Trust is harder to build in legal practice than in almost any other context, which is why our scope has to remain explicit.
Try Alawyer on a matter of your own and tell us what it gets wrong. Free trial, no credit card required.
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