Citations & source availability
The assistant backs answers up with references to the original source whenever possible. Much of this happens live: at the moment you ask a question, the assistant fetches text directly from sites like rechtspraak.nl, wetten.overheid.nl, eur-lex.europa.eu and koop.overheid.nl. You may therefore notice that a citation occasionally takes a moment to load — or, rarely, can’t be fetched at all.
What citations look like
Section titled “What citations look like”Citations appear in three forms:
- Typed source badges — small pills inline in the text, such as
ECLI,BWBR,EURLEX,KOOP,RVA,BIG,BAG,NZa,FMS,AP,ACM,UWV,BD,LIT,ECHR,CORDIS. Click the badge to open the source drawer. - Inline references like “Boek 7 BW” or “art. 7:611 BW” — they behave like a badge and open the same drawer.
- Document citations in the form
[[file.ext | "literal passage"]]— these open a file drawer with the exact passage from the document.
Treat every answer as a draft until you’ve reviewed the source behind the badge.
Which external sources are fetched live
Section titled “Which external sources are fetched live”| Type | Source | What the assistant fetches |
|---|---|---|
| Statutes and regulations | wetten.overheid.nl | article text, chapter structure, consolidated version |
| Case law | uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl | ECLI ruling, summary, body |
| Official publications | zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl, puc.overheid.nl | decisions, parliamentary papers, regulations |
| EU law | eur-lex.europa.eu | CELEX document, language variant, manifestation |
| Other registers and supervisors | bigregister.nl, kvk.nl, bag.basisregistraties.overheid.nl, autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl, acm.nl, etc. | profile, file or decision |
A full list of sources and which products use them is on Knowledge (sources & tools).
What happens when a source goes down
Section titled “What happens when a source goes down”Wetten.overheid.nl and rechtspraak.nl are heavily used public sites. During peak load or an outage on their end our live calls can briefly fail. The assistant absorbs this where it can:
- Statutes — when the upstream is unreachable the assistant falls back to a recently cached version (up to two weeks old). If that also fails, you’ll see a friendly message instead of a hard error. Timeouts and TLS errors are explicitly labelled as such.
- Case law / ECLI — if a specific ECLI can’t be found, you get a polite message instead of a 404. Depending on the document type, the assistant may try the same ruling via a German sister site or via LiDO.
- Other sources — for other live sources (KOOP, EUR-Lex, BAG, KVK, BIG, IPLO, supervisors) you receive a structured error message stating the error type and, where possible, a suggestion to retry.
What the assistant does not do: make up an answer from memory when the source is unreachable. In that case the answer says so explicitly and asks you to retry or consult the source yourself.
What you can do
Section titled “What you can do”- Retry. Most public-register outages last minutes, not hours. Re-asking is often enough.
- Check status.prudai.com. It shows whether PrudAI is currently detecting issues with the external source. We actively monitor
wetten.overheid.nlandrechtspraak.nl. - Treat the answer as a draft while citations don’t load or aren’t clickable.
- Long outage? Report it to support. For prolonged outages of a public source we’ll switch to cache mode preventively where possible, so you can keep working.
Differences across LEO, VERA and ZIA
Section titled “Differences across LEO, VERA and ZIA”- LEO has the widest set of live sources (statutes, case law, EU law, official publications, supervisors, registers) and therefore the largest exposure to upstream availability problems.
- VERA relies heavily on
wetten.overheid.nlfor the Environment and Planning Act, on IPLO and on official publications. The same fallback behaviour and error messages apply. - ZIA does not use public legal source families in chat, so it isn’t dependent on the external sites above. A ZIA connection to Nedap ONS can briefly fail in the same way, with a polite error message and no fabricated answer.