How AI helped win a Dutch court case

Last week, Ronald Zwiers won a case. Nothing unusual there—he's been practising law for years. What was different this time: Andri helped prepare it.

This wasn't a demo or a proof of concept. It was a real dispute, real opposing counsel, real stakes for the client. And we learned more from this one case than from months of building in isolation.

How AI was used to prepare an owners'-association case

The case (ECLI:NL:RBNHO:2024:2766, decided 14 March 2024) was a petition before the subdistrict court in an owners'-association (VvE) matter: whether restrictions on (sub)letting belong in the household regulations or in the deed of division. A focused legal question, but the kind of matter where the groundwork and the case law have to be exactly right.

Ronald used Andri to:

Build the timeline, pulling the relevant communications and dates into one clear overview
Find the relevant jurisprudence on the specific legal question—not general case law, but Dutch decisions with similar facts
Draft initial arguments that he then refined based on his experience and judgement

Andri mainly took the preparatory groundwork off his plate, so Ronald reached the strategy sooner. More importantly, the quality was there. The arguments were well-grounded, every citation was verified against Rechtspraak.nl, and the strategy held up in court.

What lawyers can learn from AI-assisted preparation

Building legal AI in a vacuum teaches you one thing: what sounds good in theory. Building it alongside actual legal work teaches you something else entirely.

Lawyers don't want "AI-generated" arguments. They want a first draft that's good enough to refine. The difference matters. An AI that tries to replace legal judgement gets ignored. An AI that handles the tedious parts so the lawyer can focus on strategy gets used.

Citation accuracy is non-negotiable. We already knew this, but seeing it in an actual case filing reinforced it. One wrong citation, one outdated precedent, and credibility is gone. Our multi-stage verification exists for exactly this reason.

Context is everything. The same legal question has different answers depending on the specific facts, the jurisdiction, the court, even the judge. Andri's value isn't just finding law—it's connecting that law to the specific matter at hand.

A different way of practising law

To our knowledge, this is one of the first publicly verifiable court cases in Europe where AI was demonstrably used in preparation, and won. While most news about AI in the courtroom involves hallucinated citations and sanctions against lawyers, this case shows the opposite: carefully applied AI that raised the quality of the work.

This goes beyond faster research. What we saw with this case is the beginning of a fundamentally different way of working.

The traditional workflow for a lawyer is linear: read the file, search for case law, build arguments, draft documents. Every step takes hours. Most of it isn't legal thinking, it's preparation. A lawyer with twenty years of experience still spends most of their time ploughing through materials before the real work begins.

AI changes that ratio. Not by replacing legal judgement, but by compressing preparation. On this case Ronald got through the groundwork faster and had more time left for strategy. Not because AI can think better than a lawyer. But because it can read, search and structure faster.

The result is that the lawyer has more time for what actually matters: setting strategy, weighing nuances, telling the client's story. That's the heart of the profession, and it's exactly the part that too often gets squeezed by time pressure.

This was the first case. Not the last. We're building Andri to make that new way of working possible. If you're curious about what that could mean for your practice, try it.