More Legal Research Moves as Moonlit Launches Free Commentaries

It’s all happening at the moment with legal research…..as Dutch legal publisher, Moonlit, launches Commentaries, a free library of ‘legal commentary drafted directly from primary sources,’ using its proprietary AI, and reviewed and validated by experts.

Moonlit is also bringing Commentaries to its Data API and MCP connector, so expert-reviewed commentary appears directly in AI tools such as Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude. The focus for now is mostly on EU matters.

The move is the latest in several related to legal data across the market, which has included Harvey and Legora expanding their legal research offerings. Then we have German publisher, Beck, combining with legal AI platform Noxtua as well. Plus, we have seen the LLM giants form legal data links with several smaller case law providers beyond the LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters duo. And as seen above, Moonlit is connecting to these major LLMs as well.

And that goes to show that this segment of the market – which some may have felt was quite stable, is far from in a steady state today.

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For now, they noted that Commentaries ‘covers the core provisions practitioners work with most, structured article by article. The launch focuses on indirect tax, where rules are largely harmonised at EU level but interpreted and applied across different national jurisdictions. Moonlit draws on legislation and case law from across EU member states, connecting rulings that interpret the same provisions.’

Moonlit explained: ‘Every proposition is linked to the provision it interprets and the source it rests on, allowing readers to navigate directly to the original publication, such as EUR-Lex for EU law.

‘[And] paid academic editors and practitioner-authors review each draft at publication, with verified review badges showing which passages have been validated by an expert. Each commentary also carries a reference date indicating the state of the law it describes.’

And they added that they will keep things updated: ‘While some major commercial commentary series are reviewed for currency only once or twice a year, Moonlit’s Data Layer is updated daily, flagging new rulings to editors who then review and revise the commentary and update its reference date accordingly.’

Roderick Lucas, Founder and CEO of Moonlit, said: ‘Public spending is under scrutiny everywhere and legal knowledge is a clear case of paying twice.

‘Much of this commentary is written by academics at publicly funded universities, who then have to pay to access it. The primary sources are public, and we believe the commentary built on them should be more accessible too.’

Is this a big deal?

As noted, legal research may be dominated by a handful of giants, but there is plenty going on now. One reason is that genAI has made it a lot faster and cheaper to go through whatever public data is out there and turn it into something useful for lawyers. Naturally, there needs to be a quality check, and plenty of information structuring, but the Big Two are facing increasing numbers of smaller companies that want some market share here and/or to deliver this information in new ways, sometimes to new entrants to the legal tech vertical.

P.S. AL has debated with other experts….hey Zach!….whether the Big Two are safe from lawyers using general LLMs for case law research. This site has always taken the view that general LLMs won’t have the dedicated information engineering needed to provide a competing product to fully-focused legal research platforms that spend millions $$$ on doing what they do. But……smaller, newer legal research companies, which lean heavily on AI to tap public data – and then make sure the results are reliable….well, that’s a different story. That’s the same kind of companies competing: one group huge, one group very small relatively, but quite agile and able to move fast.

If anyone is going to nibble away at Thomson Reuters’ and LexisNexis’ lunch, it will most likely be companies such as Midpage and other startups now in the legal research mix. The above news about free commentaries from Moonlit, just adds to the shifting picture.

More about Moonlit here.

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