Who Guides Lex
Built by Technologists. Guided by Lawyers.
A legal research tool built without legal guidance is a dangerous thing.
It may search quickly. It may present results attractively. But it will not know what it does not know — and in law, what you do not know can destroy a case, a client, a career.
Lex was not built by technologists who thought law seemed interesting. It was built under the close guidance of practitioners who have spent their professional lives in Sri Lankan courts, who have trained generations of lawyers, and who understand — from the inside — what legal research must actually accomplish.
Their hand is present in every aspect of this platform: in the sources selected, in the logic applied, in the standards maintained. Lex carries forward not merely legal data, but legal judgment.
Founding Legal Advisor
Senior Legal Consultant
Gamini Perera
Advocate, Educator, Counsel to a Generation
Some careers are practised. Others are devoted. Mr. Gamini Perera's thirty-two years at the Bar of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka represent the latter — a life given to the law, to its teaching, and to its proper practice.
Called to the Bar in 1993, Mr. Perera has appeared in numerous landmark cases in Sri Lanka's legal history. His expertise transcends jurisdictional borders: he is a Registered Foreign Lawyer in England and Wales, a member of the American Bar Association, and has served as recommended counsel to both the United States Embassy in Colombo and the British High Commission. Since 2012, he has represented Sri Lanka at the World Justice Forum.
But credentials, however distinguished, tell only part of the story.
Mr. Perera has personally mentored over fifty junior lawyers — guiding them from Law College to the courtroom, shaping not merely their technique but their understanding of what the profession demands. He knows what young practitioners struggle to find, what senior counsel wish they could locate faster, and what the law requires of those who would serve it competently.
This knowledge — earned across three decades, in courts at every level, with clients facing every manner of legal question — informs every aspect of Lex. The sources we include. The structures we recognise. The distinctions we preserve between what binds and what merely persuades.
Mr. Perera's path, from Warakapola to the Supreme Court, from the debating halls of Ananda College to the World Justice Forum, has always been founded on a single principle: that the law exists to serve justice, and that those who practise it bear a sacred obligation to know it thoroughly.
Lex is one expression of that obligation.
The Legal Advisory Circle
Mr. Perera does not stand alone.
Lex is shaped by an Advisory Circle of practising lawyers and legal scholars whose combined experience spans the full breadth of Sri Lankan legal practice. Professional discretion prevents us from naming them here — the Bar's customs on publicity are clear, and we respect them — but their contribution is no less substantial for being unnamed.
Among them: practitioners with decades of appellate experience who know which Supreme Court pronouncements actually govern and which have been quietly distinguished into irrelevance. Specialists in commercial law, family law, land law, and criminal practice who test our coverage against the questions they face daily. Scholars who have studied Sri Lanka's mixed legal heritage and understand precisely when Roman-Dutch principle prevails and when statute has displaced it.
They ask the questions a practitioner actually asks. They notice the gaps a practitioner would notice. They demand the precision a practitioner requires.
This is not a ceremonial board assembled for credibility. It is a working circle of legal minds who treat Lex as they would treat a junior who needs rigorous training — challenging its answers, testing its reasoning, refusing to accept "close enough" when the law demands exactitude.
Their fingerprints are throughout the system, even where their names are not.
The Rising Generation
We work alongside the lawyers of tomorrow.
Law students from Sri Lanka's universities — bright, demanding, unimpressed by reputation — test Lex against the questions their lecturers pose and the research their moot court preparations require. They approach the system without deference and with high expectations.
They find errors we missed. They ask questions we hadn't considered. They demand features that seasoned practitioners might not think to request, because they have not yet learned to work around the limitations of existing tools.
Every legal research system must eventually serve the generation now in lecture halls. We would rather learn from them now than discover later that we built for yesterday's practice.
The Profession Itself
Here is something we believe deeply: the collective wisdom of Sri Lanka's legal profession exceeds any archive we could assemble.
Statutes are published. Judgments are reported. But the understanding of how law operates in practice — the insights that come from arguing a provision before a particular judge, from watching how courts actually interpret ambiguous language, from years of seeing which arguments succeed and which fail — this knowledge lives in the minds of practitioners. It has never been collected. It has never been searchable.
Until now.
Lex includes a facility for practitioners to contribute their own insights. If you have spent years working with a particular statute and understand its practical operation in ways the bare text does not reveal, you may share that understanding. If you have observed how courts in a particular district tend to interpret certain provisions, that observation has value beyond your own practice.
These contributions are reviewed, curated, and made available to the profession. Your name is attached if you wish it; your insight remains anonymous if you prefer. Either way, your knowledge enters the stream.
This is not user-generated content in the manner of a comments section. It is professional insight, offered by qualified practitioners, subject to editorial standards. It is the legal profession teaching itself — and teaching Lex.
The archive grows. The profession is its gardener.
Tested in Practice
Beyond our formal advisors, Lex is tested daily by practising lawyers across Sri Lanka — in Colombo chambers and district courts, in specialised tribunals and appellate practice, in the quiet preparation that precedes every hearing.
Their feedback shapes our development. Their frustrations become our priorities. Their success is our measure.
We do not build in isolation and then ask lawyers to adapt. We build alongside lawyers and ask the technology to serve.
Why This Matters
You would not trust a medical diagnostic tool built without doctors. You would not trust an engineering platform built without engineers.
A legal research system must be built with lawyers — not as an afterthought, not as a marketing exercise, but as a foundational principle. The law is too complex, too consequential, and too deeply human to be reduced to mere text retrieval by those who do not understand what the text means.
Mr. Perera, our Advisory Circle, the law students who challenge us, and the practitioners who share their insights — together, they are the reason Lex understands what it understands.
The architecture is theirs. The technology is ours. The service is yours.
Developed under the guidance of those who have devoted their careers to Sri Lankan law — and enriched by those who continue to practise it — Lex carries forward a tradition of rigour, integrity, and service to the profession ෴
