What the RDG regulates

The German Legal Services Act (Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz, RDG) regulates who may provide legal services in Germany. A legal service under §2 RDG is "any activity in concrete external matters as soon as it requires a legal examination of the individual case." Simplified: anyone who gives a legal recommendation to another person in a specific case is providing a legal service — and outside of the legal profession (and a few other registered groups) this is prohibited.

The law has a good reason: legal advice requires legal qualification and responsibility. Anyone who advises without that qualification puts clients at risk — and the law protects them from that.

LEGALinhouse as a tool, not a service provider

CEAVEO is not a legal service provider. We sell a tool — software with which legally trained or experienced employees accelerate their own work. We do not step between the employee and their matter; we put tools in their hands with which they do their work better.

Concretely: when an employee at an SME generates a dunning notice draft with LEGALinhouse, the employee has produced the dunning notice — not CEAVEO. We only provided the editor, the DIN 5008 formatting, the interest calculation and the AI draft. Legal responsibility for the dunning notice rests with the employee, or with the company that employs them.

What the AI may do

The AI in LEGALinhouse may:

  • Generate drafts — letters, dunning notices, statements, contract summaries. All as drafts, always for review by the employee.
  • Deliver research — relevant norms from the knowledge graph, applicable decisions with verified case references, prevailing opinions in the literature (where retrievable from the graph).
  • Structure — turn unstructured facts into an ordered form, build timelines, identify parties.
  • Classify — categorize documents, recognize deadlines in incoming letters, extract contract metadata.
  • Apply templates — adapt an existing template to a specific matter.

What the AI may not do

The AI in LEGALinhouse may not:

  • Give binding legal recommendations. It can say what §314 BGB regulates — it does not say: "In your situation you should terminate under §314 BGB." That recommendation is made by a human.
  • Act on behalf of a client. AI output is not sent, filed or published without human approval. No auto-send function.
  • Independently submit briefs in pending proceedings. We prepare drafts; the responsibility for filing — including the question whether a brief is filed at all — rests with the human.
  • Assess risks without marking. Where the AI estimates risks, the estimate is marked as an AI estimate and not as a legally binding assessment.

Draft marking as design principle

Every AI-generated content is marked as AI draft in the UI and in the audit log, until an authorized employee approves it. This marking is not cosmetic — it is the central design decision by which we hold the RDG boundary:

Draft status in the system

  • AI output is visibly marked as draft (in the UI, in PDFs, in exports).
  • Letters cannot be sent, printed or franked until approved.
  • Approval is logged in the audit trail (who, when, with what content).
  • Revoking approval is possible; that too is logged.

This architecture ensures the AI does not silently "make law" — it proposes, the human decides.

Two tiers — attorney control for advice-adjacent functions

LEGALinhouse's functions are organised into two tiers by their proximity to the RDG line. In both, LEGALinhouse remains a tool — it provides no legal advice and never acts as a law firm, attorney or legal adviser in either tier.

The named attorney control is not fine print but a core feature: it is the legal basis on which we can offer advice-adjacent, generative AI functions (such as the constitutional review) at all — without ourselves becoming a legal-services provider. It is precisely this mechanism that upholds the RDG-compliant status of LEGALinhouse.

Base tier — everyday internal legal work

Cases, contracts, deadlines, letters, research, norm analysis, data-protection management. RDG-compliant as a pure productivity tool; professional final responsibility rests with the user. No attorney required — these functions are fully available to every customer.

Advanced tier — advice-adjacent, more generative functions

Only for functions such as a fully drafted legal argumentation, the analysis of a proposed norm, or a constitutional review (checking a norm or measure for compatibility with the Basic Law) does an additional safeguard apply: they are unlocked per customer only once an admitted attorney named by the customer assumes control and legal responsibility for the AI drafts (proof and bar-chamber number are filed). Off by default.

The boundary holds even within these functions: the constitutional review always yields a forecast (“points for / against”), never an invalidation — the power to strike down a statute rests with the Federal Constitutional Court (Art. 100 Basic Law). The AI does not declare unconstitutionality.

Graduated per-case attorney involvement

Between “no attorney” and full tenant-wide control lies the reality of many in-house teams. Attorney involvement can therefore be recorded per case in tiers:

  • No attorney — everyday internal case work.
  • “The attorney accompanies us” — we lead, loose oversight: light internal case work.
  • “We accompany the attorney” — the attorney leads and is responsible, our output is their input (watermarked “for attorney review”).
  • Attorney control (tenant-wide) — the signed activation; it dominates every case and is the only tier for external-/court-directed output.

The two middle tiers are self-declared and internal-only — they never unlock external-/court-directed output. That is precisely what makes self-declaration defensible under the RDG.

The role split is decisive: the controlling person is always an external, admitted professional named by the customer themselves — not CEAVEO. This keeps the base tier fully and RDG-compliantly usable for everyone without an attorney, while advice-adjacent functions are tied to a responsible, admitted human.

When external counsel is needed

LEGALinhouse accelerates the work of existing employees — it does not replace a lawyer. We explicitly recommend bringing in external counsel for:

  • Pending court proceedings beyond a certain complexity (when in doubt: always in contested principal proceedings)
  • Strategic decisions with significant risk (restructurings, M&A, large contract works)
  • Specialized law outside typical SME questions (medical law, patent disputes, international tax matters)
  • When in doubt about the scope of a legal question

LEGALinhouse makes the preparation of these conversations faster and better — the lawyer gets a clean, structured matter file with all relevant documents and can spend their time on what only they can do.

B2B restriction under §14 BGB

LEGALinhouse is offered exclusively to business users in the sense of §14 of the German Civil Code (BGB) — that is, to entrepreneurs, freelance professionals and legal entities. We do not offer the product to consumers. There are two reasons:

  • Legal: In the B2C area, stricter duties and tighter interpretations of the RDG apply that would be harder to reconcile with LEGALinhouse's character as a tool.
  • Substantive: The product is tailored to the workflows of a legal function — consumers would have no meaningful use case for it.

If you need external counsel and want to use LEGALinhouse to prepare: talk to us. We're happy to discuss how this scenario can be set up with LEGALinhouse.