OpenCaseLaw · Microsoft 365 Copilot

Swiss case law and legislation in Microsoft 365 Copilot. No Copilot Studio licence needed.

An agent that your IT uploads once. Everyone it is assigned to can then add OpenCaseLaw in Copilot Chat and get answers with verbatim quotations of statutes and links to the decisions. Free, open source (MIT).

Download the package (zip) Installation guide (PDF, French) Source code

Version 1.1.1 · tested in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat (Basic)

Licence and cost

The agent is a declarative agent with one action: it calls the public OpenCaseLaw server. Microsoft lists custom actions in declarative agents as available in Copilot Chat without usage-based billing (Agent capabilities and licensing models). It needs no Copilot Studio licence, no Copilot credits and no Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. It reads no data of your organisation.

For IT: install

  1. Teams admin center > Teams apps > Manage apps > Actions > Upload new app, choose the zip. The first time this page is used in a tenant, Microsoft can take up to 30 minutes to enable it.
  2. Under Available to, choose who may use the agent (default: the whole organisation).
  3. Users open Copilot Chat, Agents > more agents, search OpenCaseLaw (built by your organisation) and click Add.
  4. On the first question, Copilot asks once for permission to connect to OpenCaseLaw. After that it searches without asking.

What is in the package

An app manifest, the agent's instructions (including the citation rules), 24 read-only research tools of the OpenCaseLaw server and two icons. Readable JSON files, no program code. The AI-backed tools of OpenCaseLaw are left out.

What is sent where

Copilot sends the search terms (legal concepts, article numbers, decision references) from Microsoft's cloud to mcp.opencaselaw.ch, without any user identity or token; OpenCaseLaw sees Microsoft's IP addresses, not the users'. The agent's queries are not kept: no archive, no model training, only technical logs. The agent is instructed not to pass on names or other personal details. What OpenCaseLaw logs and keeps is described in the privacy policy.

Limits

  • A research aid, not legal advice. Check every source before relying on it.
  • Federal Council messages (Botschaften) before 2003 are not yet in the corpus.

Feedback

Questions and problems: team@jonashertner.com or GitHub.