Compendium.cat: a tool to make law in Catalan easier

When a lawyer has to prepare a document, a law student looks for a legal term, a civil servant needs a document template, or a company has to draft a contract, often the difficulty is not finding information, but knowing where to find it. In the legal field, resources are spread across websites of administrations, universities, professional associations, institutions, and various bodies. And when one wants to work in Catalan, this dispersion can turn a simple task into a time-consuming search.To facilitate this work, Compendium.cat was born, a portal promoted by the Catalan Council of the Bar Association that gathers and interrelates more than a thousand resources for legal and administrative writing in Catalan. The goal is simple: to make finding a form, an expression, a legal term, or a reference tool in Catalan as easy as possible. Much more than a legal dictionary

Entering Compendium.cat is finding a digital legal library, but also a work tool. The portal allows you to consult legal forms, linguistic resources, manuals, dictionaries, regulations, publications, and specialized materials, among many other contents.Forms are one of their most practical resources. There are procedural, notarial and contractual, business and union ones, as well as models related to different areas of law. The portal also incorporates resources for addressing registries, materials on mediation and arbitration, and other documents designed to resolve specific needs of day-to-day professional life. But Compendium.cat is not limited to offering documents. One of its peculiarities is that it connects resources to each other and allows them to be filtered according to different criteria. In the case of legal forms, for example, one can consult information about the applicable legal system, the procedural stage, or the document's revision date. This makes it possible to know if a form has been updated in accordance with the most recent legislative reforms. This combination of content and search tools makes the portal useful for very different profiles, such as legal practice, notaries, the judiciary, the public prosecution service, public administration, legal representation, mediation and arbitration, registries, companies, universities, or professionals in linguistic consulting and translation. Also for students who are still becoming familiar with the language of law. When using Catalan also means having tools

The need for this type of resource becomes especially evident in the field of justice. The latest available data shows that Catalan continues to have a minority presence in the courts of Catalonia. During 2025, only 6.34% of sentences were written in Catalan. That same year, lawsuits filed in Catalan in the civil, commercial, administrative litigation, and social areas represented 5.21% of the total. The data explains part of the reality, but there is another, less visible part, which is that in order to be able to use a language normally in such a specialized field as the legal one, it is necessary to have the necessary resources.This is where Compendium.cat wants to make an impact. It is not just about defending that Catalan can be used in law, but about facilitating its use. So that a professional does not have to start from scratch when they want to draft a document in Catalan. So that a student has tools to learn the terminology specific to their future profession. So that an administration can have adequate models and linguistic resources at its disposal.A tool for day-to-day life

The value of the portal, ultimately, is not just the quantity of resources it contains, but the possibility of having them at hand when they are needed. Because working in Catalan in the legal field should not entail an added difficulty. Neither for those already practicing, nor for those studying, nor for those drafting documents from the administration or a company.Catalan is also a working language. And for it to be so normally, it is necessary to have tools that make it possible to use it with rigor, precision, and effectiveness. Compendium.cat puts a good part of these tools in one place, for free and openly. A gateway to more than a thousand resources to make working, studying, and practicing law in Catalan a little easier.