Legislation and case-law research

Lex ships with Romanian legal reference material already indexed, so research does not start with an upload. This page covers what is in that corpus, how to search it, and — just as important — how to tell when the answer you are reading is grounded in it and when it is not.

What is indexed

Seven consolidated codes, taken from the Ministry of Justice legislative portal (legislatie.just.ro):

Code	Act
Codul civil	Legea nr. 287/2009
Codul de procedură civilă	Legea nr. 134/2010
Codul penal	Legea nr. 286/2009
Codul de procedură penală	Legea nr. 135/2010
Codul muncii	Legea nr. 53/2003
Codul fiscal	Legea nr. 227/2015
Codul de procedură fiscală	Legea nr. 207/2015

Each code is taken as its consolidated text and broken down to article and paragraph level, keeping the structural path (carte, titlu, capitol, secțiune, articol, alineat) and the consolidation date. Repealed provisions are kept and marked Abrogat rather than dropped, so an explicit lookup of an abrogated article still shows you the text and its history — while plain-language questions are answered from provisions in force. Amendment and repeal footnotes from the consolidated text are kept with the article.

Constitutional Court decisions. Decisions published on ccr.ro are collected, and the full text of each decision is extracted from the published PDF and indexed. That matters: the listing pages only carry a short subject line, so full-text indexing is what makes a topical question about constitutional case law answerable at all.

Court case data. Case records from portal.just.ro and Supreme Court files from the scj.ro archive are synchronised into the system and searchable through the assistant. Coverage of portal.just.ro depends on which courts your firm’s connector is configured for; the Supreme Court archive only contains cases heard at the ÎCCJ, so a first-instance or appeal file will not be found there.

Your own documents sit alongside all of this — see Your firm’s documents.

How current it is

The legislation corpus is re-fetched from the legislative portal daily, re-parsed, cross-referenced and re-indexed; Constitutional Court decisions are collected and indexed daily; court case records refresh several times a day. Re-indexing a whole corpus is throttled deliberately so it never competes with your own work, which means a change published today may take a little while to be fully searchable.

Because of that, and because the consolidated text on the official portal is the authority, the search results carry the reminder that a passage “may not reflect the current consolidated version on legislatie.just.ro” — and every article links straight there.

Two ways to search

Ask the assistant

Ask Lex is the natural way in, because you can ask a question rather than guess keywords. It handles two shapes of query differently:

Article lookups. Name the article and, ideally, the code — “art. 1357 cod civil”, “articolul 48 din Codul muncii”. Lex recognises the reference and goes straight to that article instead of returning semantically similar neighbours. Civil-code numbering written either way — 1357 or 1.357 — resolves to the same article.

Concept questions. Ask in Romanian legal language — “răspundere civilă delictuală” — and you get the relevant articles grouped across the codes, along with the passages that matched.

The assistant can also follow cross-references: for a given article it will report which provisions that article points to and which provisions point at it. References that could not be resolved to an article in the corpus are reported as unresolved rather than guessed at.

For constitutional case law, ask about the subject or name the decision number. Answers grounded in a Constitutional Court decision are labelled as grounded in binding case law rather than in legislation — the distinction is deliberate, because a decision binds without being a statute.

Search the corpus directly

The Search Knowledge Base quick action on Home opens a plain retrieval screen rather than a conversation. Enter a query, choose which knowledge base to search — your firm’s collections and the Romanian legislation and Constitutional Court corpora are listed together — and, for legislation, narrow to a single Code or search all of them.

Each result shows the passage, its article label, whether it is Abrogat, and View on Portal Legislativ, which opens that article on the official portal at the right place.

Use this when you want to read source text yourself; use the assistant when you want an answer assembled across sources.

Reading the answer critically

The grounding layer on Lex answers exists because a wrong citation does professional harm. Four signals, in the order you should look at them:

1. Citations. Numbered markers in the answer map to source cards under Show sources: the article or document, a short excerpt, and a link to the original.
2. The grounding badge — Certain — grounded in binding legislation or …binding case law; Hypothesis — persuasive sources only; or Verify recommended — no sources found, with a Retrieval transparency line saying what was searched and how many relevant results were returned.
3. Articles named in this answer. When the answer names an article without a clickable citation but the article is in the corpus, Lex shows it here with its code, consolidation date and a repealed marker where it applies, plus the instruction to open the text and confirm it says what the answer says. Resolving an article proves it exists — it does not prove the answer characterised it correctly.
4. Warnings. A reference that cannot be resolved is flagged as an unverified legal reference. In the worst case — the answer names a law and nothing was retrieved to support it — you get an explicit cannot confirm from the available sources notice in red. That is Lex telling you it has no basis for the claim.

If an answer is wrong, use Flag as incorrect under it and choose incorrect, hallucination, outdated or other.

Caution

Lex reduces the risk of a bad citation by making every claim traceable; it does not eliminate it. Verification against the official text is the lawyer’s, and only the lawyer’s, responsibility.

What is not in the corpus

Worth knowing before you rely on a negative answer:

• The legislation corpus is those seven codes. Other acts — ordinances, sectoral statutes, secondary legislation — are not part of it, so a question that turns on one of them has no basis to be answered from and the assistant will say so. Upload the text yourself if you need it searchable; see Your firm’s documents.
• Court case coverage depends on the connected courts, as described above.
• Where Lex cannot find a basis, it says so explicitly instead of producing a plausible article number. Treat that as the useful answer it is.

Connectors and syncing

The public data sources are managed under Settings → Integrations, which lists portal.just.ro / ECRIS, ÎCCJ — Dosare (scj.ro) and CCR — Curtea Constituțională. No API keys are involved; everything is fetched from official public endpoints, and syncing runs on a schedule once a connector is switched on.

Each card lets you connect or disconnect, turn scheduled syncing on or off, test the connection, and see when it last synced or what error it last hit. Starting a sync by hand requires the integrations-management permission; the card then polls and updates itself while the run is in flight.

Two details worth knowing:

• The portal.just.ro connector needs the courts it should follow to be configured; without them there is nothing for the scheduled sync to fetch. The card lists the available courts for reference. This is separate from linking an individual case file, which works by case number — see Case files and portal.just.ro.
• The ÎCCJ connector can be pointed at the full archive instead of the incremental update file when you want historical data; it is a larger download.