Three new laws, and what the biggest one taught us
When we opened Lectorium in beta, we made a deliberate promise: start narrow, get it right, then widen. It read three acts of Estonian employment law, and we said out loud that we'd rather do that honestly than promise "all of Estonian law" and hand you something nobody could trust.
Well - we've started widening. Lectorium now reads six laws instead of three. And the story of how we added them, especially the last and largest one, turned out to be a small lesson in what makes this kind of tool hard - and worth telling plainly.
The new arrivals
The three new laws came straight from you. After launch, people started telling us which parts of their own lives they wanted Lectorium to help them read. So we added, one at a time:
- Avaliku teenistuse seadus (ATS) - the Public Service Act. The rules for people who work for the state: how officials are appointed, their duties, their leave, how they can be released. A whole world of questions that employment law doesn't cover.
- Noorsootöö seadus (NTS) - the Youth Work Act. How youth work is organised, youth centres, youth associations. Smaller, but genuinely asked for.
- Võlaõigusseadus (VÕS) - the Law of Obligations. And this one is a giant.
Each addition follows the same careful ritual: pull the current, valid version straight from Riigi Teataja, break it into readable sections, fold it into Lectorium's search, and then - every single time - re-run our test set to make sure the new law didn't quietly break the old ones. That last step matters more than it sounds, and VÕS is exactly why.
VÕS: the big one
To give you a sense of scale: the three employment laws we launched with had a few hundred sections between them. Võlaõigusseadus alone has over 1,100. It's one of the backbones of Estonian civil life - contracts of every kind, damages, late-payment interest, sales, leases, loans, insurance, services. If you've ever signed anything, VÕS was in the room.
Adding it nearly quadrupled the amount of law Lectorium has to search through. And that raised an honest worry we wanted to test, not assume away: would drowning the system in this much new text make it worse at the questions it already answered well?
The good news, and it genuinely relieved us: no. We re-ran our whole scoreboard of real questions, and the employment-law answers held almost exactly where they were. Pour in 1,100 new sections, and Lectorium still finds the right leave provision, the right notice period, the right dismissal rule. The system stayed steady under four times the weight. That's the kind of result you only trust because you measured it.
…but VÕS also found our soft spot
Here's the part we promised ourselves we'd always tell you: it isn't perfect, and VÕS showed us exactly where.
Ask Lectorium a specific VÕS question - "how much is the statutory late-payment interest?" - and it lands on the right section beautifully. But ask it a bare definition question - "what is a sales contract?", "what is an insurance contract?" - and it sometimes stumbles.
Why? Picture a librarian. You walk up and ask, "where's the book on sales contracts?" But this library has one enormous, prominent reference book titled simply Contracts - and it sits so squarely under the word "contract" that the librarian keeps pointing you there instead of to the slim, specific volume you actually wanted. That's essentially what happens inside VÕS. There's a general section defining what a contract is, and it's such a strong match for any question with the word "contract" in it that it can crowd out the specific definition - of a sales contract, a loan contract, an insurance contract - that you were really after.
It's a subtle, almost human kind of mistake: being too helpful about the general thing, and missing the specific one. And it only shows up on those short "what is a…?" questions in this one very large, definition-dense law. On concrete, real-world questions - the ones people actually type - VÕS does well.
Why we're telling you this
We could have quietly added VÕS, posted "now with six laws!", and left it there. We didn't, for the same reason we built Lectorium the way we did in the first place: an honest limit you know about is safer than a hidden one you don't.
Lectorium never invents a paragraph. When it isn't sure it has found the right provision, it tells you so rather than bluffing - and even when it points you at the general section instead of the perfect one, it's handing you real, cited law from Riigi Teataja that you can read and judge for yourself. It fails the way we want it to fail: in the open, with the source in your hands.
And knowing precisely where it's weak is what lets us fix it. We now have a clear, measured target: get better at those definition questions in large laws. That's a solvable problem, and it's on the list.
Where things stand
Six laws, and counting: employment (TLS, TTOS, KLS), public service (ATS), youth work (NTS), and the vast law of obligations (VÕS). Each one added on request, each one measured before and after, each one honest about what it can and can't do yet.
If there's a law you keep wishing you could just ask - tell us. That's genuinely how this list grows. We added the last three because people asked, and we'll keep going the same way.
More soon, from the Crowned Phoenix workshop.
