Upload a PDF, or connect a connector?
The most common way to give AI a piece of legislation is to upload it as a PDF. That works for a single statute and a single question. As soon as you need case law, historical versions, or multiple statutes, you run into trouble. This guide compares both approaches objectively, including situations where a PDF is actually the better option.
3 984 Laws218 Case law3 598 Laws with AI explanation
Where PDFs fall short
- Scope: a civil code can run to thousands of sections, and you can fill the AI's context with a single statute alone. Case law simply cannot be fed in this way at all.
- Currency: a PDF becomes outdated the moment there is an amendment, and no one notices.
- Accuracy: AI has to pick out passages from a long document and makes mistakes doing so, particularly with section numbers and deadlines.
- Cost: every query reprocesses the entire document, which increases token consumption and slows down the response.
- Effort: someone has to download, upload and maintain a PDF for every statute and every conversation.
How a connector works
A connector does not upload anything in advance. When queried, the AI calls a search function, receives only the relevant sections or decisions, and answers based on those. The corpus is updated continuously, includes historical versions, and contains over 980,000 decisions that could never fit into any chat. Every result carries a link to the full text, so the citation can be verified.
Token consumption is lower, since only a few thousand characters of results enter the context instead of hundreds of pages. And the connection is set up once; from then on it works in every conversation.
When a PDF is the right choice
Internal guidelines, a client's contract, a collective agreement, articles of association: these are documents that no corpus contains, and they belong in the AI as a file. The ideal combination is to upload your own document and let the AI compare it against legislation from the connector. For example: you upload a lease agreement, the AI checks it against the relevant tenancy provisions from the corpus, and flags clauses that are invalid because they disadvantage the tenant.
Comparison at a glance
Uploading a PDF: a single statute, current as of the download date, no case law, manual maintenance, higher token consumption, suitable for your own documents. Connector: the entire corpus, both current and historical versions, case law with full text, zero maintenance, lower consumption, suitable for public law. The best results come from combining both.
https://mcp.europaius.com/mcp
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use a connector and uploaded documents in the same conversation?
Yes, that is the recommended approach. Your own document as a file, plus legislation and case law from the connector.
What about Projects in Claude or GPTs with an uploaded library of statutes?
They work better than a one-off upload, but have the same limitations in scope and currency. A connector supplements them with case law and up-to-date versions.
Is a connector slower than an uploaded document?
For Czech sources, it responds within seconds. The first query for a foreign jurisdiction may take a little longer, but subsequent queries are fast.