26,504 Belgian collective agreements. 152 joint committees. Thousands of sectoral texts that get amended, replaced, or expire. Until now, searching this corpus was an exercise in patience — and luck. We decided to change that.
The problem: searching Belgian collective agreements in 2026
You’re a labour lawyer, DPO, HR manager or in-house counsel. Your client — or employer — in the food industry (Joint Committee 118) is planning a restructuring. You need to urgently identify the applicable sectoral Belgian collective agreements on collective dismissals, the specific conventional obligations for the joint committee, how they interact with the Renault Act and CBA 32bis, and any additional protections provided by the sector.
In practice? You open the Belgian Federal Employment Service website, navigate an outdated interface, and hope the search engine understands your query. Then you check Justel, the Belgian Official Gazette. You cross-reference manually. Allow 45 minutes to two hours — if you know exactly where to look.
What we built: a Skill + MCP pipeline
At Lawgitech, we took a different approach, now marketed under the LawgiSkill brand: connect AI directly to official sources, in real time.
The architecture relies on two complementary layers. The Skill is a specialised instruction file that transforms AI into a domain-specific legal assistant. It embeds reference codes and legislation, procedural workflows, professional ethics safeguards, and crucially — it knows when and how to query external sources. For Belgian social law, the Skill covers collective relations, social security, anti-discrimination, social elections, the Renault Act, employee representative protection, and temporary unemployment.
The MCP server (Model Context Protocol) is the infrastructure that gives AI structured access to official legal databases. No scraping. No copy-paste. A clean API that queries primary sources and returns actionable results. Compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor and any MCP-compatible client.
The result? AI doesn’t « guess » the law. It looks it up.
26,504 Belgian collective agreements in the database
Our MCP server currently provides access to 26,504 Belgian collective agreements, of which 24,358 are currently in force, covering 152 joint committees. This includes 208 cross-industry CBAs from the National Labour Council and 26,296 sectoral CBAs — the hidden part of the iceberg.
To put this in perspective: Joint Committee 118 (food industry) alone has 1,143 Belgian collective agreements. JC 140 (transport and logistics) totals 1,002. JC 124 (construction): 470. Every CBA is searchable via full-text search, filterable by joint committee and status, and retrievable in full text.
The demo: restructuring in the food industry
To illustrate what this concretely changes in practice, we recorded a real-time session. The question asked:
« My client is in the food industry (JC 118) and plans to dismiss 25 workers out of 120 following a restructuring. What are their legal and conventional obligations, including applicable sectoral CBAs? »
In under 30 seconds, AI searches through 1,143 Belgian collective agreements from JC 118, retrieves the full text of CBA 32bis on outplacement cells, consults the Belgian Official Gazette for the Renault Act of 13 February 1998, and cross-references sources to produce a structured analysis of both legal and conventional obligations — all with verifiable references.
Watch the video demo
Why this matters
This isn’t a gimmick. It’s a change in methodology.
For lawyers and legal counsel, it means never missing anything in a corpus of 26,500 Belgian collective agreements. No more blind searching through obsolete interfaces.
For DPOs and HR managers, it’s direct access to your joint committee’s sectoral CBAs, without depending on an intermediary. Verify your company’s conventional obligations in real time.
For the legal profession, it demonstrates that AI isn’t a threat — it’s a lever. The human stays at the centre: asking the right question, validating the analysis, advising. AI does what it does best: search, cross-reference, structure.
How searching Belgian collective agreements works
The MCP protocol (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that enables an AI model to call external tools in a structured way. The Skill « knows » that a question about a joint committee should trigger a search in the CBA database. It formulates the query, retrieves results, and integrates them into its legal reasoning.
This isn’t classic RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) where text chunks are injected in bulk. It’s a targeted call to a structured source, with filters (joint committee, status, language), returning precise results. The infrastructure runs on European servers. Data comes from official Belgian sources.
Going further
Lawyers, legal counsel, DPOs or HR managers wanting to integrate these tools into your practice? Two options:
- Lawgitech Academy — E-learning on AI law, GDPR, AI Act, NIS2 and cybersecurity. With continuing education credits. → lawgitech.academy
- LawgiSkill (Skills + MCP) for your organisation — 21 legal skills + MCP connector (100+ tools, 24 official sources) compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor and any MCP client. Belgian, Luxembourg, French and EU law. → lawgi.tech — Contact: lawgi.tech/en/contact
Legal publishers and legal tech companies looking for MCP infrastructure to integrate? Our architecture is designed to be grafted onto existing platforms. Let’s talk via lawgi.tech/en/contact.
Me Jeoffrey Vigneron — Attorney at the Brussels Bar, founder of Lawgitech and publisher of LawgiSkill (OSA SRL)