If there’s one thing lawyers in the UAE consistently tell you, it’s this: finding the law should not be harder than applying it. Yet for years legal teams here have struggled with piecemeal PDFs, confusing portals, and cryptic guidance pages just to answer basic questions. These are the struggles that realLaw AI – a legal intelligence platform built by legal practitioners for legal practitioners — and born from the lived frustration of its founders, seeks to solve.
Launched in spring 2024 by Vitaly Ryzhakov and his wife, Irina, realLaw AI brings together federal, emirate-level, and free zone legislation, regulatory guidance, and case law in a single, coherent environment. Their primary goal? Usable law.
When Everyday Frustration Turns Into Product Innovation
Vitaly had been building businesses in the UAE for years. Irina, a practising lawyer, was the one who kept bumping into the same problem: “Where is the law, and is this version even in force?” They quickly realised that traditional legal research here was inefficient, but more importantly, also risky.
Recognizing the massive inefficiency and legal risk Irina described, Vitaly saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between legal expertise and technology. The breakthrough came in 2024, when Vitaly took Irina’s professional insights and began building the engine to solve the problem at scale.
TLW: Vitaly, can you take us back to the moment you knew this needed to become more than a consultancy pain point and needed a product? What was the real “aha” moment?
Vitaly: “It clicked when I saw Irina losing hours to fragmented documents just to verify a single statute. I realized that providing instant legal certainty was a necessity. We decided to stop describing the problem and build the solution: a platform that turns legal research from a risk into a competitive advantage for every business in the UAE.”
A Unified Legal Intelligence Hub With An AI Brain Built In
At the heart of realLaw AI is a set of features that legal teams will recognise immediately, but executed in a way that feels modern and grounded.
Smart Search: Law, Not Noise: realLaw AI’s AI-enhanced search understands legal context, terms, and intent. Ask for a concept, and it gives you up‑to‑date legislation, not scattered links from ten different ministries.
TLW: Vitaly, legal search is a crowded space. How did you ensure realLaw’s search stood out from other “AI search bars” as something tuned to UAE law specifically?
Vitaly: “The difference is that generic AI is a language model, but realLaw AI is a legal intelligence system. While standard AI tools often ‘hallucinate’ or provide outdated info, we built our search on a structured, verified database covering federal, emirate, and free zone legislation.”
Custom Legal Table: Your Law, Your Way: Users can build curated collections of laws, accessible from any device, always current. Think of it as a personalised legal reference shelf, but one that updates itself.
ASK PRO: Answers, Not Ambiguity: When the law is vague (and it often is), Ask Pro doesn’t dodge. Instead, it gives practical, clear answers that both junior lawyers and experienced practitioners can use with confidence.
Notifications: Ahead of the Curve: Real-time alerts for new laws, amendments, and repeals keep users in the know, which is crucial in a rapidly evolving legal environment.
Legislation Overviews: Plain English for Complex Law: Structured summaries help legal and non‑legal professionals alike, breaking dense statutes into digestible, usable insights.
What Makes realLaw AI Different and Valuable?
A few things stand out when you dive in:
- Comprehensive UAE coverage: Federal law, emirate law, and free zone legislation live together – something rarely seen in one place.
- Always in force: Each act clearly shows its current status, linked amendments, and historical versions.
- Context, not fragments: Cross-referenced acts, full metadata, and linked Supreme Court decisions build context, not just content.
- Templates on hand: Practical tools like UAE-aligned contract templates mean you can start drafting immediately.
Separately, these features could be confused for handy shortcuts, but this combination of features change how legal work gets done by reducing risk, savings hours of research, and enabling faster, more confident decisions.
TLW: Vitaly, the Legal Table and Alerts feel like ways to reduce risk as much as save time. How have users reacted to having that level of visibility and control over their legal landscape?
Vitaly: “The feedback has been centered on peace of mind. In the UAE’s rapidly evolving legal environment, the biggest risk is acting on outdated information. By providing a ‘legal shelf’ that updates itself, we’ve removed that constant underlying anxiety. Users tell us they no longer spend hours manually cross-referencing amendments; the system ensures they are always looking at the law currently in force. It shifts their focus from the stress of ‘finding the law’ to the confidence of ‘applying the law’.”
Real Impact for Lawyers and Beyond
In-house teams, boutique firms, and SMEs all have similar stories: tight deadlines, fragmented sources, and the fear of missing an amendment that matters. By giving legal professionals one consistent source of law with clear status indicators and AI tools designed specifically for legal work, realLaw AI allows legal professionals to act on clarity.
But there’s a deeper mission here too — one that Vitaly and Irina are quick to articulate.
TLW: Your mission talks about making UAE law “practical and usable.” What does that mean for business owners or entrepreneurs who aren’t trained in law but still need reliable legal insight?
Vitaly: “For an entrepreneur, ‘usable’ means getting a clear answer without needing a law degree. We’ve designed the platform to bridge that gap. Our Legislation Overviews translate complex legal jargon into plain English, helping business owners understand their obligations and rights instantly. Through tools like Ask Pro, we provide direct, actionable answers rather than just a list of links. Ultimately, it’s about democratization – giving founders the confidence to move fast and operate in the UAE without being paralyzed by legal complexity.”
For realLaw AI, the metric isn’t just speed but confidence. Confidence in the law you’re citing. Confidence in the amendments you’re tracking. Confidence that your answer isn’t out of date before you hit send.
What Can Our Audience Expect to See From realLaw AI in the Near Future?
Even in its early months, realLaw AI has already begun to influence how legal teams approach research and compliance in the UAE. To them, its just the beginning. Looking forward, the key question is where legal intelligence goes next in a market defined by diversity of sources and rapid legislative change. That’s where realLaw AI will be.
TLW: As you build out the platform, what’s next on your roadmap: deeper AI insights, predictive legal analytics, or perhaps regional expansion beyond the UAE?
Vitaly: “Our roadmap is focused on deepening both accessibility and intelligence. First, we are launching a more robust freemium version of realLaw AI; we believe basic legal clarity should be available to everyone in the market, not just those with large budgets.
From a technology perspective, we are moving from ‘search’ to ‘insights’ – using AI to provide deeper analysis and practical reasoning rather than just retrieving text. We intend for realLaw AI to remain the essential intellectual infrastructure that fundamentally changes how legal and business teams think about access to law in the UAE.”
One thing is clear: for anyone wrestling with the complexity of UAE law, realLaw AI is the type of intellectual infrastructure that changes how work gets done and how legal teams think about access to law.
