The regulatory wave keeps rolling — only the tools still date from the nineties

Few areas of business law have grown as fast in recent years as EU digital law: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the NIS2 Directive (NIS2), the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the Data Act. What used to be a niche for a few specialists is now required reading for legal departments, compliance teams and law firms across every sector. The volume of directly applicable EU law has never been greater.

Yet the tool we work with is stuck in 1998. That is exactly what Lawbster, a free, openly accessible legal-tech tool, sets out to change.

More relevance, same old interface

EUR-Lex, the EU's official legal database, does what it has to: it is complete, official and reliable. Its interface, however, clearly belongs to an earlier era of the internet. A regulation with more than a hundred recitals and just as many articles appears as a single, endlessly scrolling document. Recitals and articles sit far apart, even though they have to be read together. Cross-references to other legal acts are usually neither linked nor self-explanatory: what exactly a reference to Directive 2006/42/EC means only becomes clear after further research. Every cross-reference turns into a new, time-consuming search.

Anyone who wants to highlight or annotate this wealth of content for their own use is left with the PDF download. With it, the last bit of reading comfort disappears: documents of 100 to 300 printed pages, with no table of contents, no dynamic cross-references and no way to switch language versions. This is compounded by the many directives and other interpretive documents that have to be tracked down one by one, scattered across the web. The result: an already intricate body of law becomes even harder to navigate, and that is precisely what turns it into a compliance risk.

A gap in the market

For national law, good digital solutions exist. The online statute book LexMea sets the standard, though currently with a clear focus on German law and legal education. For some EU legal acts there are multilingual websites, among them for the GDPR or the AI Act. And this is exactly where the real difficulty shows: data protection, AI regulation, platform and cyber law are interwoven, cross-reference one another and share terms and definitions. Isolated, single-act tools are therefore not a solution. What has been missing is a holistic platform built consistently for practice. That is the gap Lawbster closes.

Built out of practice

Lawbster grew out of my own day-to-day advisory work on artificial intelligence, digitalisation and data law. Every feature has to pass one test: does it save a step that I or my colleagues would otherwise repeat many times a day? It is built for lawyers, in-house and general counsel, and compliance and data protection officers: everyone who applies EU law day in, day out.

What Lawbster does

All relevant EU digital acts bundled in one place, multilingual and clearly structured.

Personalised bookmarks, colour highlights and notes that stay put.

Interpretation-relevant recitals right beside the corresponding article, instead of buried at the start of the document.

Official directives and interpretive guidance sorted by legal act, plus an upload function for your own supporting documents.

Smart cross-references with preview and direct linking: one click instead of your own research.

Split view for reading two documents side by side, e.g. a regulation and its implementing act, or comparing two language versions.

The open beta already covers 15 key legal acts, including the GDPR, AI Act, DSA, DMA, NIS2, DORA, Cybersecurity Act, Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), Data Act, Data Governance Act (DGA) and the new Product Liability Directive. More are being added continuously.

Live in beta, and in step with the legislator

Lawbster is live and free to use in open beta. The roadmap includes further legal acts, additional language versions and new features. The "Digital Omnibus", the EU's initiative to simplify and consolidate existing digital rules, is a case in point: its first adjustments, for instance to the AI Act, are in force since 27 July 2026. The full consolidated AI Act with all Omnibus changes is live on Lawbster. These are exactly the kinds of changes Lawbster reflects promptly.

EU digital regulation is not going to shrink. All the more reason for the tools we use to apply it to finally arrive where the law has long been: in the digital present.

See it in practice

The problem is structural; the fixes are practical. A good place to start:

EU AI Act Compliance Timeline, every key date from 2024 to 2030, kept current.

The AI Act Just Moved, the deadlines that just moved.

Read the AI Act on Lawbster with linked cross-references and one-click language switching.

Browse all EU digital acts in the Lawbster workspace.