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 in a few 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, my expectations were modest: maybe two or three colleagues would subscribe, I'd stop scrolling bger.ch every morning, done. Today there are over 400 Swiss lawyers reading the digest daily. 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, and the bigger updates I just 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 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 just a generic "OR" 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, 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.
I wanted a tool that takes that work off my desk – and makes it feel like a morning coffee, not another task 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 – and suddenly the pressure is on
After the first LinkedIn post things moved fast. Within a few days over 400 lawyers had signed up. 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 past few days. 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, made-up considerations. 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 issue, 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, you only read the top.
New private-law categories
Until now, private law was lumped into a single "OR" bucket. Too coarse for most subscribers. You can now subscribe specifically to employment law, tenancy law and other OR subcategories. If you're already a subscriber, just 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 hated the most when reading the digest myself: almost every decision was being labelled as a change of established case law (Praxisänderung), court fees were spelled out, formal notices were 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"
A classic: the model liked to drift into German Federal Republic spelling (and terminology – "Bundesgerichtshof" instead of Bundesgericht was my favourite bug). 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 got a German ruling still received the German summary. Fixed. French subscribers now actually receive French summaries – regardless of the original language of the judgment.
What I've learned from this project so far
A few observations to share, 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.
Context cut-offs are insidious. Truncating long rulings produces subtly wrong summaries that are harder to detect than obvious hallucinations.
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 kindly and saying: "Consideration 3.2 doesn't quite say what your tool claims." Practically every one of the updates above traces back to an email like that.
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
