August 2026 Newsletter

I write only once a month. July’s newsletter about nominee companies produced more replies, questions and discussion than any issue we have sent. I knew the crackdown mattered, but the reaction reminded me how large the consequences are. For some people, this is not an abstract debate about company law. Their home, savings and future in Thailand are tied to a structure the authorities are now examining.

The obvious question came back repeatedly: if a nominee company is illegal, what lawful protection does a foreigner have? This month I answer it directly. I also look at the next change every business owner should understand: AI has moved from answering questions to performing work. Then I introduce the ThaiLawOnline membership that starts now in August, including our Lease Scanner and the Contract Maker we are building. Finally, I explain why a document presented as a Thai “land paper” might prove full ownership, a limited possessory right, a state allocation, or almost nothing at all.

July was also one of the most productive months in our history. I have added a separate, highly visible list of what we built: the new annotated Thai Civil Procedure Code, the annotated Thai Criminal Procedure Code, hundreds of section-level pages, new Supreme Court analysis, practical guides and the Lease Scanner.

These four subjects share one principle. A familiar method is not necessarily a safe method. Property structures, business systems, legal services and land documents must be understood for what they legally and practically do, not for what a salesperson calls them.

1. After the Nominee Company: Which Property Right Fits?

Foreigners generally cannot own land in Thailand. Nothing below changes that rule. These legal rights protect use, possession, a building, or an investment while the underlying land remains owned by a Thai national or another legally qualified owner.

I started working with usufructs around 2006 and published one of my first detailed articles on the subject in 2008, still online today on AseanNow. At the time, most foreign buyers were offered only a 30-year lease or a Thai company. Usufruct was in the Civil and Commercial Code, completely lawful and registered at the Land Office, but few firms serving foreigners used it seriously.

Twenty years later, we now have four mostly used tools. None is perfect. There are other ways to protect a real-estate investment, such as the right of habitation, mortgages and reciprocal agreements, but I will not enter into them here. The proper choice depends on who owns the land, whether a house already exists, who pays for construction, the client’s age, family situation, need for inheritance, and the practice of the Land Office holding the title.

Usufruct: often the best fit for a home and a Thai spouse

A usufruct, or sitthi kep kin, gives the holder the registered right to possess, use and take the benefits of another person’s property. For an individual, the right may last for a fixed term of up to 30 years or for the usufructuary’s lifetime.

This often suits a foreign spouse whose Thai husband or wife genuinely owns the family land. The Thai spouse keeps ownership. The foreign spouse obtains a registered lifetime right to live there and use the property. If the owner later sells the land, a properly registered usufruct normally remains written on the title and follows the property.

The weakness is equally important: a usufruct is personal. It ends when the usufructuary dies and does not pass to the children. A usufruct also does not make the foreigner owner of the land or automatically prove ownership of the house.

Superficies: usually stronger when the foreigner builds

A right of superficies, or sitthi nuea phuen din, separates ownership of a building from ownership of the land underneath. The land belongs to one person. The house, factory, structure or plantation belongs to the superficiary.

This is usually the better starting point when the foreigner will finance and construct a new building. Registration should be arranged before construction begins, with the building permit, contracts, invoices and payment evidence supporting the same ownership position. Unless the registered instrument restricts it, superficies is transferable and inheritable. It may be granted for a fixed period, for the life of the landowner, or for the life of the superficiary.

The weakness is practical. Registering one sentence on a title deed does not repair poor evidence about who already owns an existing house. Some Land Offices accept a superficies over an existing structure; others want clearer evidence or prefer registration before construction. If the building is the main investment, the ownership evidence must be planned from the beginning.

Sap Ing Sith: broader commercial control, but only for 30 years

Sap Ing Sith is the newest option. The Sap Ing Sith Act B.E. 2562 created the right in 2019. It applies to Chanote land, buildings on Chanote land and condominium units. The holder receives broad rights to use and benefit from the property for up to 30 years. The registered right is transferable, inheritable and mortgageable.

Those features make Sap Ing Sith attractive for a commercial project or an investment intended to continue through heirs. But it is not land ownership, and it is not a 60-year or 90-year right. The legal maximum is 30 years. Unless the agreement provides otherwise, buildings added or modified by the holder belong to the property owner when the right ends. The instrument is also still unfamiliar to many officials, banks and buyers.

A registered lease: useful, but not three guaranteed terms

A standard residential lease remains useful, especially between unrelated parties or with a developer. A term longer than three years must be registered to remain enforceable beyond the first three years, and the ordinary maximum is 30 years. Promises of “30+30+30” are not three registered terms. A future renewal requires a future owner, a future agreement and a new registration. The second 30 years should never be valued like the first.

A proper structure therefore requires more than downloading a bilingual agreement. We first check the title, registered encumbrances, mortgage priority, the landowner, the building status and local Land Office requirements. We then prepare both the private agreement and the documents needed for registration. If the right must protect a substantial payment or a future construction, registration should occur before or at the same time as the money moves.

2. AI Has Moved From Answering Questions to Doing the Work

For the 20 years I have managed law firms in Thailand, I always had an assistant or secretary. Someone answered routine questions, collected basic information, checked my calendar, scheduled appointments, sent reminders and followed up when a client forgot a document.

Today, an AI system performs much of the first administrative layer. It does not replace a lawyer, and it does not replace the judgment of an experienced employee. But it answers the simple questions, gathers the file information, checks availability, proposes appointments, translates routine messages, identifies missing documents and sends a matter to the correct person.

This is not a theory about the future. It is already changing our own costs.

What changed inside our firm

Until late 2025, we used Mailchimp for newsletters. I then built our own system with n8n, a workflow automation platform. The first month was not perfect. Some workflows failed. Some messages were duplicated. We corrected the process, added checks and kept improving it. This newsletter is now assembled and distributed through our own automated system.

The Community edition of n8n has no software subscription. We already operate a server, so the additional software cost is close to zero. Time, hosting and model usage still have a cost, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But the recurring marketing-platform bill disappeared.

We did the same with the website chatbot. We were paying around US$40 each month to Chatbase. New models helped us rebuild the limited features we needed around our own legal information and workflows. We did not copy another company’s source code. We reproduced the useful function for our own business: receive a question, find the relevant internal material, give a controlled answer, collect contact information and send the matter to a human when needed.

Kimi K2 was not a curiosity

In January, I recommended Kimi K2 as a free alternative readers should try. A few people asked why a Thai law newsletter was discussing a Chinese AI model.

On 16 July, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3. Moonshot describes it as a 2.8-trillion-parameter, natively multimodal model with a one-million-token context window, designed for long-running coding and knowledge work. The model weights are available, which is more precise than calling the whole system “open source.” Downloadable weights also do not mean free operation. A model of this size requires serious computing power.

The important point is direction. Chinese open-weight models are no longer cheap imitations sitting years behind. Kimi K3 now competes close to proprietary frontier models on several demanding tasks. At the same time, OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 family and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 show how quickly top-level capability is improving while costs fall. What looked expensive and experimental six months ago might become ordinary business software six months from now.

The shift from prompts to agents

Two or three years ago, most people used AI like a better search box: ask a question, receive text, copy the answer. Prompting became a special skill. People wrote pages of instructions hoping to force a weak model to behave consistently.

Clear instructions still matter, but the centre of the work has changed. Strong models need less ceremony. The larger change is from answers to tasks.

An agent receives a result to achieve, access to approved tools and data, rules about what it must never do, and points where a human must approve the next step. The useful business question is no longer, “Which chatbot writes better?” It is, “Which repeated task should stop consuming an employee’s afternoon?”

This applies far beyond law firms

• Hotels and property managers: answer routine guest questions in several languages, schedule viewings, issue check-in instructions, classify maintenance requests and follow up after repairs.
• Restaurants and retailers: compare supplier prices, summarize customer reviews, prepare promotions, update menus or product descriptions and flag stock anomalies.
• Real-estate agencies: qualify leads, match requirements to listings, arrange appointments, prepare comparison sheets and chase missing documents without making legal promises.
• Exporters and factories: read purchase orders, compare invoices, flag inconsistent quantities, prepare shipping-document checklists and report delays.
• Professional firms: conduct first-stage research, organize files, prepare drafts, track deadlines and turn knowledge hidden in old matters into searchable institutional memory.

The fastest improvement usually does not begin with firing anyone. It begins by removing repetitive work from good employees. A receptionist should handle the unusual client, not type the same office directions for the fiftieth time. A lawyer should decide strategy, not search ten folders for the last version of a clause. A hotel manager should solve a guest’s real problem, not manually copy a booking number between systems.

3. Membership Starts Now: A Different Kind of Law Firm

Last month I said we were rebuilding membership. This month it is no longer an idea for later: the new ThaiLawOnline membership starts now, in August 2026.

Netflix changed the way people watch films. YouTube changed the way people learn. Instead of buying one object and losing access when it becomes outdated, people subscribe to a service that keeps adding, organizing and improving content. Legal work is more serious than entertainment and important decisions still require a lawyer. But the same expectation is coming to our profession: clients want continuous access, useful tools, updated documents and help that remembers who they are. They do not want to begin from zero and pay for every small question.

Many law firms are experimenting with memberships. Too often the offer is an expensive promise of “unlimited advice,” a folder of generic forms, or a discount card. Our approach is different. Membership should give a client something useful before a problem becomes a legal file. It should combine reliable information, self-service tools and access to lawyers at the appropriate level.

Five levels, from free research to a lawyer on call

The full comparison and current joining instructions are on our Membership Levels page. Bronze makes the first layer accessible to everyone. Silver is the centre of the system: at ฿1,490 per year, it costs about ฿124 per month and gives members a growing bilingual document collection rather than one form bought once and forgotten.

Silver is not a donation

Silver costs ฿1,490 per year, or a little more than ฿4 per day. In return, a Silver member receives unlimited downloads from our bilingual template collection, a document vault with updates when the law changes, and 15% off lawyer services. The member receives a real service. At the same time, the recurring fee gives us a stable budget to continue work that a traditional law firm rarely publishes for free.

Silver helps pay for Thai-source verification, English translation, lawyer review, website development, private legal databases, server costs and the time required to maintain hundreds of connected pages. It supports projects such as the annotated Civil Procedure Code, the annotated Criminal Procedure Code, the Lease Scanner, our Supreme Court database and this monthly newsletter.

A normal law firm earns money only after somebody has a problem. I prefer a model where part of our work prevents the problem. If members receive better contracts, clearer warnings and relevant legal updates early, they save money and we build a stronger long-term relationship. This is why I believe membership will become a major part of legal services.

The Contract Maker: a document that starts with your facts

Our most important new membership project is the Contract Maker. A traditional template asks the client to understand the law and find the correct blanks. A general AI model can produce elegant language but may invent a clause, use the law of another country or omit the registration step that makes the right useful in Thailand.

The Contract Maker is built the other way around. And it is not a promise for next year: the system is already working. During August we are testing it document by document, correcting and improving it before opening it fully to members. It asks what the parties are trying to achieve, identifies the important facts, selects clauses from our controlled bilingual library, warns when the facts do not fit the chosen document, and shows when registration or a lawyer’s review is needed. A loan between friends, a power of attorney, an employment agreement and a usufruct should not be generated by the same vague prompt.

A first look at the Contract Maker in testing: each document, named in English and Thai, follows its own legal logic. This screen shows only the beginning of the list, the bilingual library behind it is far larger.

I believe this can become the most useful contract tool offered by any law firm serving Thailand. The advantage is not that an AI writes faster. The advantage is the combination of technology, Thai legal rules, our clauses, our experience since 2006 and a path to human review. The model can change; the legal knowledge and the quality controls belong to us.

Try the Lease Scanner now

You can already see the principle working in our Thai Lease Red-Flag Scanner. Paste a residential lease and the program checks deposits and advance rent, termination and eviction, early-exit penalties, repairs and maintenance, subletting and sale. Every warning is tied to the relevant provision of the Civil and Commercial Code or the residential rental rules. Update (16 August 2026): the Lease Scanner is now included with Silver membership (THB 1,490 a year) and above, at three scans per day. It is no longer available on the free Bronze account.

The first version reads English or Thai and produces the report in English, Thai or both. Because the legal retrieval and the output language are separate, the same system can be extended to more languages without rebuilding the underlying law each time.

For a first-stage review, I trust this process to catch routine lease red flags more consistently than a quick reading based only on memory. It does not become tired, skip the final pages or forget to check a deposit rule. That does not mean software replaces a lawyer. A complex commercial lease, a major investment or an unusual factual problem still needs professional judgment. The tool’s job is to make the first review fast, systematic and available to everyone.

From a mass newsletter to a legal service that knows your profile

The next stage goes beyond templates. A property owner in Phuket, a restaurant operator in Chiang Mai, a foreign spouse in Isaan and a retired condominium owner in Pattaya do not need the same updates. Members will be able to identify their situation and interests. Our system can then match new laws, regulations and Supreme Court decisions in our Thai Law Library to the people they affect.

Instead of sending everybody another generic alert, the member might receive: “A new decision affects lifetime usufructs,” “This employment-law change applies to your company,” or “A new immigration rule concerns your current visa.” That is the level of legal customization we are building: the right update, in plain language, connected to the member’s existing documents and profile.

Our new website chatbot is another part of that system. It is available on the website now for quick questions about Thai law and our services. In the future, its deepest functions may be limited to members, because a serious assistant needs a maintained database, computing resources, privacy controls and continual legal review. Free tools can introduce the service; membership makes continued quality possible.

Two complete procedural codes, section by section

Together, these two projects created hundreds of permanent, searchable pages. Every section has its own address and links to the surrounding provisions. This is useful for lawyers and clients, and it also gives search engines a structured map of Thai procedural law instead of another superficial article repeating the same general information.

New articles, tools and major updates published in July

1. False “Lost Chanote” Reports in Thailand: Supreme Court Decision No. 914/2569, four months in prison without suspension and THB 4.8 million compensation through Criminal Procedure Code Section 44/1.
2. Harassment Laws in Thailand: the new criminal provisions, civil remedies, protective orders, workplace exposure and practical complaint procedure.
3. Thailand’s Ungrateful Child Law: when a parent or donor seeks revocation of a gift for serious ingratitude under the Civil and Commercial Code.
4. Risks of Buying Property in Thailand: title, access, construction, contract, foreign-ownership and deposit risks before money changes hands.
5. The Thai Lease Red-Flag Scanner: bilingual first-stage analysis against Thai lease rules and our private legal database.
6. Thailand Employment Law for Employers: contracts, wages, leave, termination, severance and compliance after the latest amendments.
7. Thailand’s Nominee Company Crackdown: expanded through 31 July with the latest Department of Lands and Department of Business Development enforcement details.
8. The Thai Law Library: the central access point for our codes, annotations, cross-references, more than 84,000 Supreme Court decisions and AI-supported legal research.
9. The July 2026 Newsletter: the nominee crackdown, AI in legal work and the first preview of the membership now opening.

Most online legal content disappears in a feed after 24 hours. We are building a permanent, searchable body of Thai legal information that can be corrected, connected to new decisions and used by both people and carefully controlled AI.

4. The Title Deed Trap: A Land Paper Is Not Always Ownership

Someone shows a foreign buyer a paper with a government emblem. The land has a house number, electricity, a road and a family living there for 25 years. The seller says, “Do not worry. Thai people buy this type of land all the time.” Money changes hands.

Only later does the buyer learn the paper was not a title deed. It was a tax receipt, a possessory notice or an agricultural allocation over land still belonging to the State.

Thailand does not have one single “land paper.” The Thai Land Code recognizes different documents that prove very different rights.

Names change while the risk stays the same. The state land people used to describe with the old “Por Bor Tor” tax papers is, since the Ratchaphatsadu Land Act of 2019, officially called Ratchaphatsadu land: property of the State managed by the Treasury Department. We published a full guide to Ratchaphatsadu land this year. Other serious categories include forest-reserve land, national-park land and land administered by other government agencies. Long occupation does not automatically privatize state land. Nor does a sale contract between two people force the government to recognize rights neither party possessed.

Even a genuine Chanote is not enough by itself

A photocopy of the front page does not show the full legal position. The back contains registered transactions and encumbrances. The Land Office file might reveal a mortgage, lease, usufruct, superficies, servitude, court seizure or other restriction. The paper might also be old, altered or no longer reflect the current record.

Physical reality must match the record. Does the plot on the ground correspond to the title? Are the concrete markers present? Is there legal access to a public road, or only a neighbor’s permission? Does the house sit fully inside the boundary? Is construction allowed under zoning, environmental and building-control rules? Does the person offering the property have legal authority to sell it?

This is why proper property due diligence means checking the current government record at the competent office, not simply translating the seller’s copy.

More Than AI: Why I Brought My Personal Website Back

I am convinced that AI will control more of the routine work in the legal field. But I am equally convinced that a good law firm must become more human, not less human. When software can produce a polished biography, a hundred posts and a perfect studio portrait in an afternoon, clients need stronger evidence of who is behind the work.

That is why I brought SebastienBrousseau.com back online. It contains an archive of almost 1,000 articles about my travels, places, food, music and experiences in Thailand. Some are imperfect. Some belong to a different period of my life. Together, they show something a generated “About Us” page cannot: what I noticed, where I went, the photographs I took and how my view of Thailand changed over more than two decades.

Recent entries include living beside Cha-Am rather than Hua Hin, a short trip to Chiang Mai, the city’s small live-music bars after dark, and Baan Krut, a coast that still feels like Thailand used to feel. The complete article index is there for anyone who wants to explore.

AI can help me restore an old archive, improve a translation or organize photographs. It cannot go back and live those years for me. It did not sit in the small bars, take the train, choose the wrong road, meet the people or decide which ordinary moment deserved a photograph. Experience is not a prompt. That human record matters to me, and I think it matters when a client chooses whom to trust.

A Human Note: Angine de Poitrine

Since January, every issue of this newsletter has ended with a cultural note. I started it on purpose: after pages of law and AI, I want to step out of both and come back to human things. This newsletter is not meant to be only a law firm writing about its services. It is also an expatriate who has lived in Thailand for more than two decades sharing the places, music, food and people that make a life here, the same spirit as my personal website above. So, after property restrictions, automation systems, membership tools and title-deed warnings, I finish with something created for no practical reason other than human imagination.

I recently discovered Angine de Poitrine, an experimental rock duo from Saguenay in Quebec, the province I come from. Khn and Klek de Poitrine perform behind enormous papier-mâché heads and black-and-white polka-dot costumes. One plays microtonal guitar and bass through loops. The other plays drums and percussion. The music moves through odd time signatures, repeated patterns, sudden changes and rhythms that should feel mathematical but somehow make crowds dance.

Their full KEXP performance, recorded in Rennes in December 2025, has now been watched around 18 million times. Their second album, Vol. II, was released on 3 April 2026. They are now performing internationally, yet the project still feels homemade, strange and completely independent of what the music business normally tells artists to become.

Perhaps this is one reason they connect so strongly right now. We are surrounded by discussions about machines producing more text, images, music and video. Angine de Poitrine feels like the opposite: two humans making difficult, playful and unmistakably personal art with handmade masks, unusual instruments and an idea nobody asked them to simplify.

AI might imitate a style after people create it. It does not reduce the value of the human decision to be strange before anyone knows whether the strangeness will work. For me, art is where the beauty of human beings remains easiest to see. Angine de Poitrine is pure art.