Why Legal Mind builds its Legal Research Agent on Moonlit's Data API

Legal Mind is a legal AI platform built for the Dutch legal market, used by more than 1,000 legal professionals: lawyers, in-house counsel, legal teams, independent legal specialists and tax lawyers. What sets it apart is case-based context. The platform brings together the documents, facts, legal sources and previous work behind a matter. Their goal is clear; AI supports the actual case in front of a lawyer rather than answering like a generic chatbot. By taking repetitive, information-heavy work off their plate it gives legal professionals more time for strategy, client relationships and the legal work with the highest added value. Security and European hosting are core priorities, both for the platform and for the AI models behind it.

That promise runs on legal sources and for the first stretch of the company's life Legal Mind produced them itself. It scraped and indexed legal data in-house, source by source. Getting a source into the platform was only the start. Each one then had to be monitored, updated and maintained as the law changed. Expanding coverage was engineering-intensive and slow, and every hour spent on the pipeline was an hour not spent on the product capabilities that create the most value for users.

Over the past year the customer base grew from a small group of users to more than 1,000 legal professionals and the demand for sources grew with it. Different practice areas depend on different databases, publications and authorities. Adding and maintaining them at the pace its customers needed increasingly became more challenging and time consuming.

George Gowers, co-founder and CTO, made the call to bring the data layer in through Moonlit rather than keep building it. One integration expanded Legal Mind's source coverage while the engineering team stayed focused on the AI workflows, reliability and user experience that set the product apart. The alternative was to carry on building and maintaining the entire data pipeline in-house and no other external provider offered a comparable fit.

On top of the Moonlit Data API, the team built a Legal Research Agent. With a single request the agent searches across more than 100 legal sources, identifies the relevant materials and brings them straight into a case or dossier, where the source-backed context feeds further research, analysis, review and drafting. Legal research stops being an isolated step and becomes part of the workflow around the matter. Because the Data API embeds directly into that case-based workflow, legal information reaches the lawyer without becoming a separate product or forcing anyone out of Legal Mind.

"The technical integration was straightforward and working with the Moonlit team was smooth throughout. The partnership has made it significantly easier for us to give our customers access to the legal sources they need."

George Gowers, Co-Founder & CTO, Legal Mind

For a lawyer with the Moonlit add-on there is no switching between tabs, repeating a search across several databases or scrolling through long lists of results. The lawyer asks a question in natural language, the Legal Research Agent searches across the 100+ sources and the relevant material appears inside Legal Mind. From there the lawyer moves straight to the next step, whether that is analysing an issue, reviewing a document or drafting advice.

Since the May 2026 launch, legal research has become a natural part of users' daily work. What they value most is moving from a legal question to relevant, verifiable sources without leaving Legal Mind, instead of searching multiple databases and copying information into a case by hand. The feedback Legal Mind hears most often is that research feels less fragmented and that users have more confidence in the AI-generated output. For Gowers, that confirms the thesis: combining AI with direct access to authoritative legal sources creates real value for legal professionals.

That thesis points to where Legal Mind goes next. Trustworthy legal AI sits at the foundation of the product strategy, because in legal work an answer is only worth something when the professional can verify where it came from, weigh the underlying authority and apply their own judgment. Legal Mind builds for output that is source-backed, transparent and context-aware, made to support legal judgment rather than stand in for it. Verifiable answers are what reduce the risk of hallucination and earn a lasting place in a lawyer's daily work.

For another legal tech founder weighing whether to build a legal data pipeline or plug into one, Gowers is direct:

"Plug in. 100%. A legal-data pipeline is not a one-off engineering project. It needs continuous ingestion, indexing, monitoring, updates, quality control and source-specific maintenance."

George Gowers, Co-Founder & CTO, Legal Mind

About Legal Mind

Legal Mind is a legal AI platform built for the Dutch legal market, used by more than 1,000 legal professionals including lawyers, in-house counsel, legal teams, independent legal specialists and tax lawyers. The platform helps them research, review, analyse and draft within the context of a case or dossier, bringing the relevant documents, facts, legal sources and previous work together so the AI supports the actual matter. Based in Amsterdam, Legal Mind runs on Dutch hosting, is GDPR compliant and ISO 27001 certified. 

About Moonlit

Moonlit provides global legal data, built for AI. Through Moonlit Connect, the Data API and MCP server give legal AI products access to the Moonlit Data Layer: 17M+ documents across 30 European jurisdictions, connected by a reference graph of 35M+ references and verifiable down to the source. Moonlit is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant and based in Amsterdam.