Claude connected to Legifrance: the practical guide to making the connection

Claude is probably the most powerful tool available today to a lawyer who wants to work faster. It analyses, structures, drafts, rewrites. But it has a blind spot many discover too late: it does not consult Legifrance. Its legal knowledge is frozen at its training date. An article amended by ordinance, a judgment published six months ago, a recent implementing decree: none of it is reachable by default.

The result: Claude can cite an article in its 2023 version when it has been amended since. It can miss a Cour de cassation ruling that reshapes the point. And in a document sent to a client or filed in court, that kind of error costs dearly.

That is exactly why OpenLegi MCP exists.

What the MCP concretely changes

MCP is a protocol developed by Anthropic that lets Claude interact with external tools in real time. OpenLegi builds on that protocol to give it direct access to the official French databases: legal codes, judicial and administrative case law, the Official Journal, CNIL decisions, constitutional questions.

When the connection is live, Claude no longer answers from memory. It queries Legifrance, retrieves the up-to-date text, cites it with its exact reference and folds it into its answer. The difference is immediate:

Without OpenLegi, ask Claude for article L. 1121-1 of the Labour Code. It will give you something plausible. With OpenLegi, it goes and finds the article in the official database, in its consolidated version, and cites it with its source.

The principle is simple: you ask your question as you would ask an associate. Claude decides on its own whether going to Legifrance is relevant. No special syntax. No technical handling.

Connected in under 5 minutes on claude.ai

The most direct method needs no installation at all. On claude.ai, go to Settings, then Connectors (or Integrations depending on the interface). Add an MCP server with the following URL, replacing the token with the one you get from openlegi.fr once your account is created:

https://www.openlegi.fr/mcp/token/YOUR_TOKEN

Once connected, a tools icon appears in Claude's input bar. Test it straight away with:

"Retrieve article L. 1121-1 of the Labour Code as in force and explain what it means for an employer."

If the answer mentions the Legifrance source, you are up and running.

What you can do right now

Once connected, six tools are available inside Claude. The two that change a lawyer's day the most:

rechercher_code: access to every French code in its consolidated version. Civil, commercial, labour, criminal, intellectual property, general tax code. The article you cite in a note is the one in force today, not the one from two years ago.

rechercher_jurisprudence_judiciaire: search across the Judilibre and Legifrance databases. Cour de cassation rulings, court of appeal decisions, by keyword, theme or appeal number. A survey of case law that took an hour can be done in a few minutes.

The other tools cover administrative case law (Conseil d'État, administrative courts of appeal, administrative tribunals), CNIL decisions, constitutional questions and monitoring of the Official Journal.

Three use cases that speak for themselves

The first: you are preparing a note on a non-compete clause. Instead of working from memory on the validity criteria, you ask Claude to check the applicable articles on Legifrance and to build the note citing each source. You read it over, you sign it.

The second: a client brings you a case about the abrupt termination of a commercial relationship. You ask Claude for the last 5 commercial chamber rulings on the subject, with a summary table of the solutions reached. Claude queries Judilibre and produces the table. What took an hour takes ten minutes.

The third: you follow the Official Journal on employment law. Each week you can ask Claude to retrieve the texts published and to identify the ones that affect your live cases. Monitoring stops being the task you keep putting off.

What the tool does not replace

Two important limits to know. BOFiP is not covered by OpenLegi: for administrative tax doctrine, Legifrance remains the only source, to be consulted directly at bofip.impots.gouv.fr. Collective agreements are also partial in the database, so always check the extended version at legifrance.gouv.fr.

And on substance: an answer sourced from Legifrance is not legal advice. The strategic analysis, the characterisation of the facts, the advice, that is your added value and your responsibility. Claude is an accelerator. It does not substitute for professional judgement.

For any document sent to a client or filed in court, the article cited deserves a direct check on Legifrance. Thirty seconds. That is your professional responsibility, not the tool's.

The full guide, to download

We condensed everything worth knowing into an 8-slide guide: the two connection methods (claude.ai and Claude Desktop), the 6 available tools in detail, 9 advanced ready-to-use prompts, the use cases by field and the good practice for keeping control of your sources.

If you work in company law, employment law, tax law, intellectual property or public procurement, this is the kind of tool that changes daily working conditions. Not in six months. Now.