Reviewed by ThaiLawOnline, a licensed Thai law firm practising in Thailand since 2006. Thai lawyer of record: Wichuda Atthamethakon, LL.M., Thai Bar Licence 3149/2556.
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Ask a question about Thai law in English, French or Thai, directly on this website. ThaiLawOnline has built and configured an online legal assistant around our legal articles, selected documents and a knowledge base maintained by our team. Use the assistant to understand an issue, find relevant reading and prepare better questions before speaking with a lawyer.
Start here · Free online assistant
Look for the dark-blue chat bubble
The white speech bubble at the bottom right opens the AI assistant. The green LINE and WhatsApp buttons are separate ways to contact our team.
On this page
How to use the online assistant
Open the chat. Click the dark-blue speech bubble at the bottom right, or the “Open the AI assistant” button above. On a phone, tap the same bubble. The conversation opens inside this website.
Start the conversation. Enter your email address when prompted; your name is optional. Select “Start chatting”. The email step lets the service associate the conversation with you. Choose EN, FR or ไทย at the top of the chat, and write your question in your preferred language.
Give the useful facts. State the subject, the province or office involved, your nationality or immigration status where relevant, and any important dates. Ask one main question at a time. Keep each message under 2,000 characters. Press Enter or select the send arrow; Shift+Enter adds a new line.
Read, then follow up. Open the source links shown with the response and ask about anything unclear. The chat also offers microphone input and a listen button for replies, where supported by your browser. Microphone access requires your permission.
Built around ThaiLawOnline’s legal knowledge
Our contribution is the legal material and the way the assistant is configured. The knowledge base draws on ThaiLawOnline website content, selected legal documents, prepared answers and our team’s practical explanations. We set instructions covering Thai-law scope, language, fees, source references and when a question requires individual attention.
The current service combines a language model with retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. For each question, software searches the indexed material and supplies relevant passages to the model before the answer is written. This connects modern generative AI to resources selected and maintained by ThaiLawOnline.
A knowledge-base update and a model-training exercise are different operations. Updating our indexed material gives the assistant revised reference material without retraining the underlying model. Website and knowledge-base refreshes run on schedules, so a new article or legal change is not necessarily available to the assistant immediately. The chat also does not search our entire research collection on every question.
How vector search works
A vector is a list of numbers representing features of a piece of text. An embedding model produces those numbers. Texts with related meanings tend to have similar vectors, which lets a search find relevant material even when the reader uses different words from the article.
Imagine asking, “What happens to my apartment if my spouse dies?” Relevant passages might discuss succession, inheritance or a surviving spouse without repeating your exact question. Vector search helps find those connections. A similarity score measures a relationship between texts; the score is not a legal opinion or a probability of being correct.
During indexing, source documents are divided into smaller passages, called chunks. Each passage is stored with its vector and source details. The question receives a vector too, and the system compares the question with the stored passages. Our website service stores these records in a database and performs the vector comparison in its search layer. A separate branded vector-database product is not required for this approach.
The assistant also has a direct lookup for section numbers mentioned in a question. This complements meaning-based search, because similar wording is not enough when the exact legal provision matters. Always identify the relevant Act or Code as well as the section number.
Fine-tuning, instructions and retrieval
“Trained on our documents” is often used loosely in descriptions of AI assistants. The precise description of this service is configured by ThaiLawOnline and connected to our curated knowledge base. The current website assistant uses retrieval and custom instructions, not a model separately fine-tuned by our firm.
| Method | What changes | Our website assistant |
|---|---|---|
| Pretraining | Builds the model’s broad language capabilities from large datasets. | Performed by the model provider. |
| Custom instructions | Tell the model how to respond, which subjects to cover and which limits to observe. | Written and configured for ThaiLawOnline. |
| RAG and vector search | Find relevant passages and supply them as reference material for a particular answer. | Used to connect answers to our indexed legal resources. |
| Fine-tuning | Uses an additional training process to adjust a model’s parameters for selected tasks or behaviour. | Not part of the current website assistant’s customisation. |
Fine-tuning is useful for some specialised tasks and response patterns, but does not automatically keep legal information current. Uploading a document, revising an instruction or clicking a feedback button is not, by itself, fine-tuning. Feedback helps identify answers needing review; the assistant does not automatically learn a new legal rule from each conversation.
Questions to try
A focused question produces a more useful starting point than “Tell me everything about Thai property law”. These are examples of questions to enter, not statements about your own circumstances:
“I am a French citizen considering a condominium in Hua Hin. What documents should I request before paying a reservation deposit, and which points need confirmation with the Land Office?”
“Explain the difference between a lease, usufruct and superficies in Thailand. Show the relevant sources and the practical registration questions I should ask.”
“I am preparing for a marriage-based extension in Bangkok. Which documents should I check with the Immigration office, and which requirements depend on my circumstances?”
Useful follow-ups include “Which source supports that point?”, “Is this a legal rule or office practice?”, and “What facts are missing before a lawyer could advise me?” If you change the subject, restate the relevant facts instead of assuming every earlier detail carries across.
Check sources and protect your details
Source links help you inspect the material retrieved for an answer. They do not prove every sentence in the response. An older page, a missing amendment, an incomplete question or an unsuitable retrieved passage could still produce a wrong answer. Ask for the relevant provision and date, and check the original authority where the point matters.
Our instructions tell the assistant not to invent fees or legal citations and not to predict court or immigration outcomes. Those are operating rules, not a guarantee of perfect compliance. Confirm service prices on our published fees page. For a filing deadline, registration, payment or disputed document, have the underlying facts checked before acting.
The service stores conversations and uses external AI providers to process questions and generate responses. Do not paste passwords, passport numbers, bank details or confidential case files into the public chat. Describe the issue with names and identifying details removed. Use a direct, agreed channel with our team for documents requiring personal legal review.
Free access and personal legal advice
The online assistant is free to use, subject to daily message limits and service availability. A chat answer is automated information; a lawyer does not review each reply before you see it. The assistant does not lodge applications, register rights at the Land Office or act as your representative.
For advice on your particular documents, dates and options, book a consultation. If the chat offers a follow-up form, select the contact option and confirm your question to request a reply from our team. Opening the AI chat alone does not book an appointment.
Other tools and technical reading
For a longer explanation of the technology, see Pinecone’s explanation of retrieval-augmented generation and IBM’s comparison of RAG and fine-tuning. These explain the methods; they do not describe or endorse ThaiLawOnline’s implementation.
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