Cross-Border
Cross-Border Legal Comparison
Compare how different EU jurisdictions handle the same legal issue, automatically, across languages.
Built by: International law firms, corporate legal departments, EU policy teams, comparative law platforms
The problem
Cross-border legal work requires understanding how different jurisdictions approach the same legal issue. A question like "How do EU member states handle non-compete clauses in employment contracts?" requires searching Dutch, German, French, Belgian, and EU-level court databases separately, each with its own language, citation format, and search interface.
A lawyer doing this manually might spend days on what is fundamentally a search problem.
Even with access to all the databases, the barrier is linguistic: you need to know that the Dutch term for non-compete is "concurrentiebeding," the German term is "Wettbewerbsverbot," and the French term is "clause de non-concurrence."
How the API powers it
Semantic search eliminates the language barrier entirely. Because it searches by meaning using vector embeddings rather than keyword matching, a single English-language query finds conceptually relevant rulings across all indexed jurisdictions, regardless of the document's language.
Search for "enforceability of non-compete clauses in employment contracts" with jurisdictions set to Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and European Union, and you get back relevant decisions from the Hoge Raad, Bundesgerichtshof, Belgian courts, and the CJEU in a single response. Add reranking for maximum precision on complex comparative queries.
Each result includes structured metadata: court, jurisdiction, year, ECLI identifier, field of law, and citation count, giving you everything needed to build a structured comparison.
The integration pattern
A cross-border comparison tool built on the Moonlit API follows a straightforward pattern.
Take a legal concept as input, run a semantic search (or hybrid search for queries that include specific legal references) across the target jurisdictions, group the results by jurisdiction, and retrieve full documents with AI summaries for the top results in each group.
The sources filter lets you narrow results to specific court levels (supreme courts only, for example) for an apples-to-apples comparison. The fields of law filter ensures results stay within the relevant legal domain. The result is a structured comparison that used to take days, delivered in seconds.
Key endpoints
Example request
curl -X POST "https://api.moonlit.ai/v1.1/search/semantic_search_reranked" \
-H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"query": "enforceability of non-compete clauses in employment contracts",
"jurisdictions": ["Netherlands", "Germany", "Belgium", "European Union"],
"num_results": 20,
"rerankerType": 1
}'