Lectorium is open: ask Estonian employment law, read the answer in the law itself
Some projects begin with a customer brief. Ours began with a question that wouldn't leave us alone: what would it take to build a small, purposeful AI that genuinely understands Estonian - and could help people read their own law?
Today we can stop describing it and simply say it: Lectorium is live, in beta. You can try it right now.
What Lectorium does
Ask a plain-language question about Estonian employment law - "Kui pikk on põhipuhkus?", "Kui pikalt pean ette teatama, kui tahan töölt lahkuda?", "Mis on tööõnnetus?" - and Lectorium finds the relevant provision in Riigi Teataja and shows it to you: the exact section, quoted word-for-word, with a link straight to the source.
It does not answer from memory, and it does not paraphrase. It hands you the actual legal text. And if it can't find a provision that clearly answers your question, it says so - plainly - instead of guessing.
That last part is the whole point. An answer without a citation, to us, is not an answer worth giving - least of all about the law, where a confident-sounding guess is worse than an honest "I couldn't find that."
What it covers - for now
Lectorium's beta is deliberately narrow. It reads three acts of Estonian employment law:
- Töölepingu seadus (TLS)
- Töötervishoiu ja tööohutuse seadus (TTOS)
- Kollektiivlepingu seadus (KLS)
We chose to start small and get it right - real answers, real citations, honestly scoped - rather than promise "all of Estonian law" and ship something nobody could trust. From here, we widen.
Built Estonian-first, by a small team
Behind Lectorium is a longer story that we've been telling as we went: a from-scratch exploration of Estonian-first AI - a language model and a tokenizer we trained ourselves, on our own language, on modest hardware, learning the whole stack end to end. We wrote up the surprises and the stumbles along the way, and we'll keep doing that.
But the thing you're using today works on a simple, trustworthy principle: find the right law, and show it to you. The cleverness is in the finding - understanding what you meant, even in your own words. The truth comes from the statute itself. Lectorium is the reading companion; Riigi Teataja is the source.
And it's ours, end to end - built and run by Crowned Phoenix, not rented from someone else's cloud. For a tool that reads Estonian law, that felt like it mattered.
A few honest words
Lectorium is a beta, and a research project. It is not legal advice - Estonia regulates who may provide that, and we don't. It currently covers only employment law. Laws change, so always check the effective version of anything it cites - Lectorium links you straight to it. And because it's early, it will sometimes surface the wrong section, or miss one. When it does, we genuinely want to hear about it - that's how it gets better.
Try it
Go ask it something real - a question you've actually wondered about at work. Read the law it hands back. Click through to the source. Then tell us what you think.
For the first time, there's something you can hold in your hands while you wait for the rest.
More soon - from the Crowned Phoenix workshop.
