BGer Digest: My weekend project became a Swiss Federal Supreme Court decisions newsletter – and went viral
Quick heads-up: this post is personal. I'm writing it in the first person because the project I want to talk about started as a weekend experiment and snowballed within days. It's called bger-digest.ch – a daily Swiss Federal Supreme Court decisions newsletter that uses AI to summarise the rulings the Swiss Federal Supreme Court published the previous day and drops them in your inbox the next morning.
When I shipped the first version in March 2025, my expectations were modest: maybe two or three colleagues would subscribe, I'd stop scrolling bger.ch every morning, done. Within 72 hours of the first LinkedIn post, over 400 Swiss lawyers had signed up. With that reach comes – predictably – the responsibility to make sure the summaries are actually correct. That's what this post is about: what BGer Digest does, why I built it, how it fits into a fast-moving Swiss LegalTech market, and the updates I rolled out after the first weeks with real readers.
What BGer Digest actually is
BGer Digest is a free, daily Swiss Federal Supreme Court decisions newsletter. Every morning at 08:00 you receive a curated summary of the rulings published the previous day on bger.ch – at a glance, readable, in the language of your choice, and filtered by the areas of law you actually care about.
When you sign up you choose:
Area of law – criminal law, public law, tax law, and now subcategories within private law such as employment law or tenancy law (instead of a generic "CO" bucket)
Language – German or French (the summary arrives in your language regardless of the original language of the ruling)
Scope – only the rulings flagged for publication or all of them
The result is an email you can read in under five minutes that keeps you current without scrolling through case numbers yourself.
Why I built this in the first place
If you practise law in Switzerland, you know the pattern: the Federal Supreme Court publishes decisions continuously, and most of them slip past unnoticed. People watch the leading decisions – those designated for inclusion in the official collection – but the merely-published rulings get ignored systematically. Yet that's often where the quiet tightening of case law, or the subtle clarification, happens that ends up mattering later.
This isn't an academic observation. Art. 112 of the Federal Supreme Court Act (BGG) requires the court to give reasons for its decisions and to publish them. That duty to give reasons is precisely why published non-leading decisions carry legal weight: the court lays out its reasoning openly, and it is inside those considerations (Erwägungen) that a silent shift in practice often lives – one that later surfaces in a contract negotiation, a clause review, or a pleading.
A concrete example from Q1 2025: a private-law ruling on the validity of liability exclusions under Art. 100 CO, published in January 2025 (BGer 4A_XXX/2024), refined the standard for excluding liability for minor negligence in contracts with private customers. Not a leading decision. But for any law firm reviewing SaaS agreements with Swiss end-users, immediately relevant. Without a systematic digest, this ruling falls through the cracks – it won't appear in the week's journals, and bger.ch offers no personalised alert function.
I wanted a tool that takes that work off my plate – and makes it feel like a morning coffee, not another item on the to-do list. A Swiss Federal Supreme Court decisions newsletter that doesn't look like a legal journal from 1950 but is short, clear, and readable.
So I spent a weekend on it: a scraper for bger.ch, an LLM call for the summaries, a simple mailer, a landing page. Online.
400+ subscribers in 72 hours – and suddenly the pressure is on
After the first LinkedIn post on 18 March 2025, things moved fast. Within 72 hours, more than 400 lawyers had signed up – largely from Zurich and Romandy, with a notable share of in-house teams from pharma and financial services. Honestly, it was both flattering and uncomfortable. Because the realisation hit immediately: if 400 people read this every morning, "weekend project quality" is not acceptable.
So I sat down, combed through the last issues carefully, gathered a lot of feedback, and shipped a stack of changes over the following weeks. Here are the most important ones.
What just changed in BGer Digest
No more hallucinations
Early on there were simply too many faulty summaries: content that wasn't in the ruling, wrong case numbers, invented considerations. One example that bothered me most: on a CO ruling about debtor default under Art. 97 CO, the model hallucinated a consideration stating the court had described a four-week grace period as standard practice in the industry. That sentence did not exist in the original judgment. A subscriber at a Zurich firm caught it quickly and wrote back – which is exactly how it should work, but is not a quality process I want to rely on.
I changed three things: a stronger model, a better scraping pipeline (cleaner extraction directly from bger.ch), and no more context cut-offs on long rulings – even 60-page judgments are now processed in full. This was the most important fix, and it's done.
"Flagged for publication" first
A lot of feedback pointed at the same thing: the rulings that really matter are the ones flagged for publication. The newsletter is now split into two parts: at the top, the rulings flagged for publication; below them, everything else. If you want the short version, read only the top.
New private-law categories
Until now, private law was lumped into a single "CO" bucket. Too coarse for most subscribers – particularly because the Swiss Code of Obligations (CO) spans everything from sales contracts under Art. 184 CO to employment under Art. 319 ff. CO and mandate relationships under Art. 394 CO. You can now subscribe specifically to employment law, tenancy law, and other CO subcategories. If you're already a subscriber, click "Manage subscription" in the latest BGer Digest email and adjust your filters.
Better summaries: less "change of case law", less boilerplate
The mistake I disliked most when reading the digest myself: almost every decision was labelled as a change of established case law (Praxisänderung), court fees were spelled out, formal notices repeated – none of it actually relevant. Summaries are now noticeably clearer and more concise, with a "change of case law" flag only when there genuinely is one.
No more "ß" and no more "BGH"
A classic: the model liked to drift into German Federal Republic spelling and – what bothered me more – German terminology. "Bundesgerichtshof" instead of Bundesgericht was my favourite bug, because it implies the cited court is not the correct one at all. The prompt now explicitly anchors on Swiss spelling and Swiss legal terminology. If you still spot a stray "ß" or "BGH" anywhere, please let me know.
French version fixed
An embarrassing bug: subscribers on a French plan who received a German ruling still got the German summary. Fixed. French subscribers now actually receive French summaries – regardless of the original language of the judgment.
Why right now – the 2025 market context
BGer Digest didn't emerge in a vacuum. The Swiss LegalTech market has become noticeably more active over the past 18 months. Tools like Legartis for contract analysis and Lexia for legal research are established players. On the German market, JUVE has offered curated decision formats for law firms for years. What didn't exist in Switzerland was a daily, linguistically correct, thematically filtered digest covering the Federal Supreme Court in full – including the decisions that don't make the official collection.
Compliance pressure is adding to the demand from two directions. The revised Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (revFADP / revDSG) has been in force since 1 September 2023. Art. 24 revDSG governs the notification duty for data security breaches; Art. 30 ff. revDSG governs commissioned data processing. Federal Supreme Court rulings on data protection – for example on the conditions for valid consent under Art. 6 revDSG, or on proportionality of data processing – can shift practice directly but are rarely communicated broadly. The digest fills that gap.
At the same time, the CPC (ZPO) revision is ongoing: the National Council voted in March 2025 on several contested points in the partial CPC revision. Rulings issued in that transitional environment – on the applicability of old versus new procedural rules – are critical for litigation lawyers, and exactly the type of silent practice shift the digest is built to catch.
A view from inside: how the workflow and quality control actually work
This section is missing from most LegalTech tool descriptions, so I'm writing it explicitly.
The digest workflow runs automatically every day. The scraper pulls new decisions from bger.ch in the early morning, extracting case numbers, dates, area of law, original language, and the full decision text. The LLM call then generates a structured summary per decision with the fields: facts, legal question, outcome, key considerations, and – only when genuinely present – a change-of-practice flag. After that, an automated check runs against specific patterns: does the generated case number match the scraped one? Is a court named that is not the Federal Supreme Court? Does the summary contain citations that don't appear in the source text?
These automated checks catch a lot of errors, but not all of them. What they cannot replace: reading by someone who knows Swiss law. That is the real limitation of a one-person project at this scale – and the reason subscriber feedback is not just appreciated but structurally necessary.
A practical note for law firm teams: if you use the digest as part of your daily monitoring, I recommend occasionally cross-checking decisions in your core practice areas against the original text on bger.ch – not because I don't trust the quality, but because no automated system substitutes for a domain-experienced lawyer reading the source.
How BGer Digest and CASUS Legal Research work together
A digest is an early-warning system, not a research substitute. What BGer Digest does: it tells you that yesterday a ruling on Art. 100 CO came down. What it doesn't do: it doesn't tell you whether that ruling affects the liability clause in the contract you're currently reviewing.
That's exactly where CASUS comes in. The Legal Research feature searches across 660,000+ cantonal and federal decisions in a source-based, structured way – including inline previews of the relevant considerations directly in the chat, without clicking through to the original. An in-house team in Basel that wants to check, after a BGer Digest alert, whether a new CO ruling affects their supplier contracts can do that directly in CASUS: enter the legal question, read the relevant considerations, derive a recommendation – and then use AI Chat Agent Mode to adjust the affected clause in the Word document on the spot.
The digest and CASUS are complementary. One creates awareness; the other creates clarity.
What I've learned from this project so far
A few observations, in case you're building your own legal AI tool:
Off-the-shelf models are not Swiss. Without an explicit Swiss prompt, every summary drifts towards the German legal system and German spelling. That's not a trivial problem: "Bundesgerichtshof" and "Bundesgericht" are not the same court, and conflating them produces legally incorrect information.
Context cut-offs are insidious. Truncating long rulings produces subtly wrong summaries that are harder to detect than obvious hallucinations. A decision where the core reasoning appears on page 40 of 60 will be misrepresented if the model stops processing at page 30.
Reach is not proof of quality. 400 subscribers does not mean 400 people are happy. It means 400 people have the chance to see your mistakes.
Feedback is gold. The best error reports came from replies to the newsletter – people writing back and saying: "Consideration 3.2 doesn't quite say what your tool claims." Practically every update above traces back to an email like that.
Compliance context is not optional. Building a newsletter for Swiss lawyers means being clean on data protection too. BGer Digest does not process personal data from decisions – the Federal Supreme Court anonymises those itself before publication – but subscriber data (email address, preferences) is stored exclusively in Switzerland and not shared with third parties, in line with the principles under Art. 5 revDSG and the commissioned processing requirements under Art. 30 ff. revDSG.
Subscribe and give feedback
If you work in Swiss law and want a pragmatic Swiss Federal Supreme Court decisions newsletter, sign up here: bger-digest.ch. It's free, the signup takes a minute, and you can unsubscribe whenever you want.
If you're already a subscriber: I'd love your feedback. What works? What doesn't? Which filters are missing? Which kinds of decisions do you want to see more of, which less? The easiest way is to reply directly to the daily mail or drop me a message on LinkedIn.
And because this really did start as a side project: every honest piece of feedback helps me turn BGer Digest from a weekend experiment into a tool Swiss lawyers can actually rely on.
See you tomorrow morning at 08:00 in your inbox.
– Celeste
FAQ
What is BGer Digest?
BGer Digest is a free, daily newsletter that uses AI to summarise rulings from the Swiss Federal Supreme Court and sends them to your inbox every morning at 08:00. When you sign up, you choose your area of law, your preferred language, and whether you want all decisions or only those flagged for publication.
Why do non-leading decisions matter?
Art. 112 of the Federal Supreme Court Act (BGG) requires the court to give reasons for its rulings and to publish them. Even decisions not included in the official collection (BGE) contain Erwägungen that refine or quietly shift practice. These are rarely covered in legal journals but can be directly relevant to daily contract work and litigation – for example, a January 2025 ruling on liability exclusions under Art. 100 CO that affected the standard of review for SaaS contracts with Swiss end-users.
How reliable are the summaries?
Summaries are based on the full decision text extracted directly from bger.ch – without context cut-offs, even for long rulings. Automated checks verify case number consistency and court designations. That said, no automated system replaces reading the original text when a decision is directly material to a case or contract. I recommend using the digest as an early-warning layer and verifying through bger.ch or CASUS Legal Research when you need depth.
Which areas of law can I subscribe to?
Currently available: criminal law, public law, tax law, and private-law subcategories including employment law (Art. 319 ff. CO), tenancy law, and general contract law (incl. Art. 97–100 CO, Art. 184 CO). The offering is being expanded. If a category you need is missing, reply to any digest email and let me know.
Why did early summaries say "Bundesgerichtshof" instead of "Bundesgericht"?
General-purpose language models are trained predominantly on German-language text and drift into German Federal Republic terminology without explicit instruction. The Bundesgerichtshof is Germany's highest civil court; Switzerland's equivalent is the Bundesgericht (Federal Supreme Court). Using the wrong name implies the wrong court – legally incorrect information. This is fixed by explicitly prescribing Swiss legal terminology in the prompt.
How does BGer Digest handle data protection?
The digest does not process personal data from decisions – the Federal Supreme Court anonymises those before publication. Subscriber data (email address, filter preferences) is stored exclusively in Switzerland and is not shared with third parties. This is consistent with the principles set out in Art. 5 revDSG and the commissioned processing requirements under Art. 30 ff. revDSG, which have been in force since 1 September 2023.
How does BGer Digest fit alongside a tool like CASUS?
The digest is an early-warning layer: it tells you which rulings came down yesterday. CASUS is the analysis tool: its Legal Research feature searches across 660,000+ cantonal and federal decisions with source-based, traceable outputs and inline previews of key considerations. A Zurich employment lawyer who spots a new Art. 336 CO ruling in the digest can open CASUS, run a targeted search, read the relevant Erwägungen in context, and use AI Chat Agent Mode to update a contract clause – all without switching tools. The two are designed to work in sequence, not in competition.
Is the digest available in French?
Yes. You can select French as your digest language at signup. The summary will arrive in French regardless of which language the Federal Supreme Court used in the original ruling. An earlier bug that sent German summaries for German-language rulings even to French-plan subscribers has been resolved.
