entscheidsuche

The Entscheidsuche MCP Server provides access to Swiss court decisions via the Entscheidsuche API. It exposes tools to search case law, retrieve full documents, and list available courts. You can perform natural language queries to locate relevant decisions, fetch documents in JSON, HTML, or PDF formats, and explore court coverage and document counts. This server is designed to integrate with MCP clients like Claude Desktop or the MCP Inspector, enabling streamlined legal research workflows and automated document retrieval.

To use the server, configure an MCP client to point at the local node server (as shown in the installation docs). The primary tools exposed are: search_case_law for querying decisions, get_document for retrieving full texts, and list_courts to discover which courts are available and how many documents they hold. You can also leverage prompts like legal_research and case_analysis to structure complex research tasks. When you retrieve a document, you’ll typically supply a signature and spider name (e.g., CH_BGer) to obtain the full content.

Prompts and resources support fast, template-driven workflows for legal research and case analysis, and the API endpoints this server uses provide access to the Elasticsearch search index, the document repository, and real-time court status information.

Prerequisites:

• Node.js (recommended LTS)
• npm or yarn
• Access to the project repository (clone or download)

Installation steps:

1. Clone or download the repository git clone https://github.com/your-org/self-tech-labs-entscheidsuche-mcp-server.git cd self-tech-labs-entscheidsuche-mcp-server

2. Install dependencies npm install

3. Build the project npm run build

4. Run the server (example) npm run dev

5. Verify the server is running

   • Open a browser or use curl to hit the MCP Inspector or the configured endpoint
   • Ensure that the server exposes search_case_law, get_document, and list_courts capabilities

Notes:

• Update the absolute path in your MCP client configuration to point to build/index.js after build.
• If you customize environment variables (see notes), ensure they’re available to the Node process when starting.

Tips and common issues:

• Ensure you have network access to entscheidsuche.ch endpoints used by the server (Elasticsearch, documents, and status feed).
• When retrieving documents, you may need to provide a document signature and spider name (e.g., CH_BGer) to locate the correct file in the repository.
• If you run into build or runtime errors, check TypeScript compilation targets and ensure the build output path /absolute/path/to/entscheidsuche-mcp/build/index.js exists.
• For production deployments, consider configuring environment variables for API endpoints, rate limits, and logging levels as supported by MCP and your hosting environment.
• Refer to the MCP Inspector to test queries and verify the server responds with expected MCP messages.