DiamLaw

145 statutes, 8 EU legal acts, 23,790 provisions – on the device

DiamLaw ships with 145 German federal statutes and 8 EU legal acts in full: 23,790 individual provisions altogether. They range from the BGB (Civil Code), StGB (Criminal Code), ZPO (Code of Civil Procedure) and HGB (Commercial Code) through the whole of tax, employment and social law to the GDPR, the TFEU and the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Everything sits on the device, so the library works the same on a plane, in a courthouse basement or anywhere without a signal as it does at home.

• Every statute shows the amendment status given by the source and the date it was retrieved
• Grouped by area of law, with a search field covering the entire library
• Whole statutes and individual provisions can be marked as favourites separately
• The free version includes 30 core statutes; the complete library comes with Pro

A working desk, not a wall of tiles

The first screen is not a menu but your desk. “Continue reading” opens the provision you read last, exactly where you left off. Below it sit the cards you actually need – and DiamLaw hides empty sections by itself.

• Cards for favourites, bookmarks, dossiers, chains of provisions, case law, tools and the study mode
• Your most recent notes and highlights appear directly underneath
• Ten sections, freely arrangeable – you decide the order
• Bookmarks: save a provision with one tap and find it again through a section of its own

Read like a book – cite like a case file

In DiamLaw you read statutes whichever way suits you: swipe horizontally from provision to provision, turn pages with a real page-curl as in a printed code, or scroll continuously. A section slider along the right edge takes you through an entire code in seconds, the table of contents searches the full text of the open statute, and a quick switcher keeps your recent and favourite codes at hand.

• Press and hold the text or double-tap it – the familiar selection handles and loupe appear, with “Highlight” and “Note” placed ahead of the system actions
• Ten muted highlight colours, and you can give each colour a meaning of its own (“disputed”, “exam-relevant”)
• Every highlight and note remembers its citation down to the sentence (“§ 2 sentence 1 BGB”) and shows it with a text excerpt in the overviews
• Four ways to copy straight from the selection: the text alone, the text with its citation, the citation alone (“§ 15 (1) sentence 2 UStG”) or an app link that leads right back to the spot
• “Read highlights only” collects every highlight in a statute in document order as a reading list of its own – with citation, colour meaning and a jump back to the provision
• Read aloud with abbreviations spoken in full, paragraph by paragraph; the speed takes effect at once and playback continues when the screen switches off

Finding, not searching

Typing “§ 15 UStG” or “Art. 3 GG” is enough – DiamLaw recognises the citation and jumps straight there. The same search finds statutes by title and abbreviation, surfaces matching chains of provisions and runs a full-text search across every statute you have access to, showing each match in context. Recent search terms stay within reach.

• Citation scanner: point the camera at a handout, a brief or an official notice and the provision opens at once. Recognition runs on the device, no picture is taken and none is stored
• Case law is reachable straight from the search as well

Read, cite and keep decisions of the federal courts

Decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court and of the BGH, BFH, BAG, BSG, BVerwG and the Federal Patent Court can be searched and read inside the app – freely by keyword or through eight practice-area cards, each showing the federal court responsible. The source is the Federal Government’s open legal information portal, queried without a key and without signing in.

• Judgments read just like the statutes, with official paragraph numbers as the citation layer
• Press and hold a paragraph and you get the finished citation: “BFH, judgment of 27 March 2019 – V R 61/17, para. 14”
• Provisions quoted in a judgment are tappable and open the statute
• Any decision you want to keep stays readable offline – if you highlight a decision or add a note, the app saves the text along with it automatically
• Highlights and notes in judgments are anchored to the exact paragraph number, and a whole judgment can be shared as a PDF
• From any open provision, a menu entry leads to the decisions that cite exactly that section – searched as the official citation form as an exact phrase, narrowed to a single subsection if you wish

Deadlines with a calculation you can follow

Enter the trigger date, pick the deadline – done. 19 ready-made presets cover the classics: appeal, revision, unfair-dismissal claim, objection to a tax assessment, withdrawal, limitation periods, notice of defects in a commercial sale and more. Any other deadline can be entered freely.

• Below the result stands the full calculation under §§ 187, 188 and 193 BGB, with citations
• The federal state is selectable, because § 193 BGB turns on the public holidays that apply in the place concerned – all 16 states are included
• Result and calculation can be shared as text, for the case file or the office calendar

Explained on the device

Have any provision explained in plain language, or a long judgment condensed into holding, facts and reasoning. The language model is Apple’s built-in one and runs entirely on the iPhone: no text leaves the device, there are no running costs or subscription fees, and it works in aeroplane mode.

• Every result carries a clear note that automatically generated text can be wrong
• Only the original wording is authoritative – and it stays one tap away
• A device with Apple Intelligence switched on is required

You decide what travels

Highlights, notes, favourites, dossiers and offline judgments sync between your devices – through three separate switches: content and annotations, design and settings, images. A status line, a diagnostic view and a “sync now” button show openly what the sync is currently doing. On top of that, a backup writes all your data to a file that you store yourself – that one belongs to Pro.

Your data stays yours

DiamLaw needs no sign-in and no account, and DiamApps runs no servers of its own. Everything that syncs lives solely in your personal iCloud. You can create a profile with a name, a birthday and a photo, and it stays purely on the device. The statutory texts come from “Gesetze im Internet” (the official statute portal of the Federal Ministry of Justice) and from EUR-Lex, the decisions from the Federal Government’s legal information portal. Every statute included is listed in the app with its amendment status and retrieval date, and the source is shown again beneath each provision and each judgment.