Starting this academic year, all law students at VUB will gain access to Ex Ante's legal search engine, enabling them to check, correct, and enrich AI-generated texts with relevant judgments, rulings, and legal documents.
Today, law students and legal professionals use generative AI that can formulate seemingly sound answers to legal questions in seconds. However, in law, this output is particularly vulnerable. While AI models hallucinate less frequently for knowledge-based questions, the error rate for legal queries is significantly higher due to the often complex and nuanced nature of the subject matter. Therefore, law students must learn to view AI-generated texts with a critical eye, which is precisely where Ex Ante will now assist them. Ex Ante's legal search engine accesses only verified legal sources like legislation, case law, and legal scholarship, always displaying the most relevant original documents. This allows students to more easily and quickly verify any legal standpoint themselves.
The Faculty of Law and Criminology at VUB aligns this collaboration with its own educational objectives. Within the legal methodology course, students learn to conduct legal research, handle a wide variety of sources, distinguish relevant information, and test the output of an AI system against the text it is based on. In this context, Ex Ante will prepare students for the changing expectations from the legal field, where AI literacy is increasingly an essential professional skill.
"Our students will work with AI regardless. So, we shouldn't dig our heels in and try to prevent it, but rather teach them how to use AI tools responsibly: where does an answer come from, are the references correct, is it still current, and what is missing? A legal search engine that quickly shows you the original source text is an excellent tool for this. I personally work with Ex Ante daily and notice that the gain is not only in time savings but primarily in the certainty that you can trace every step of your reasoning back to a source. That is exactly what we want to teach our students," states prof. dr. Frederic Eggermont, Faculty of Law and Criminology at VUB.
For Ex Ante, the collaboration is also a return to their alma mater. All four founders studied at VUB: Lucas Van Wichelen graduated in law and then entered the legal profession, Othman El-Hammouchi, a mathematician, became the team's AI expert, Bram Dewit is a computer scientist and lead backend developer, and Stijn Desloovere is a computer scientist and lead frontend developer. The company is building legal search technology from Belgium where the jurist, not the AI model, makes the final decision.
"We all received our legal and scientific education at VUB, so this collaboration means a lot to us. We are building Ex Ante precisely because we are convinced that AI should not take over the jurist's thinking. Our search engine doesn't spoon-feed the user a definitive answer but provides the documents that allow them to form their own opinion. This requires students to read the source material themselves, weigh texts against each other, and ultimately make decisions. Those who learn this as students will continue to do so as lawyers or jurists," says Lucas Van Wichelen, co-founder of Ex Ante.
Specifically, all Law students at VUB will receive full access to Ex Ante's search engine, which also assists them with their research work within Microsoft Word. In return, Ex Ante collects feedback from students, who indicate which search results are useful, where the search engine falls short, and which sources they are missing. This input is then used to further refine the search technology.
The collaboration stems from the conviction that technology should strengthen, not replace, the critical thinking skills of future jurists, even in a world where AI models generate legal texts ever more quickly and convincingly (at least at first glance).
