Interview with Joséphine Mansour about strategic alliances, the importance of legal data, and European digital sovereignty.

Joséphine, thank you for taking the time today to talk about your work. Let’s jump right into it: Why Noxtua? What makes it special, and why did you decide to join? 

Noxtua supports legal professionals in their day-to-day work across research, document understanding, and drafting. It is a European Legal AI designed specifically for lawyers and legal teams — both legally compliant and legally competent — because it is built on exclusive, high-quality legal data provided by leading European publishers and tailored to real professional legal workflows. 

What truly sets Noxtua apart is its integrated, end-to-end approach. We don’t just build an interface: we control the entire AI system, from infrastructure and models to data and the application layer. This level of integration ensures a very high standard of security, compliance, and governance, while giving legal professionals access to authoritative and diverse European legal content. Beyond technology, Noxtua is also a strategic project. As Europe’s sovereign Legal AI, it demonstrates that it is possible to build powerful and competitive AI systems grounded in European values — privacy, transparency, the rule of law, and professional confidentiality. 

Joining Noxtua therefore felt like a natural continuation of my career and my convictions. As a lawyer and former Group General Counsel, I have experienced first-hand how fragmented and time-consuming legal work can be, particularly in complex or international environments. Noxtua directly addresses this reality by supporting legal professionals with a safe, sovereign AI that enhances efficiency without compromising independence, confidentiality, or professional judgment. 
 
In other words, this is AI at the service of the law — and of those who uphold it. 

We are living through a pivotal moment. The question is no longer whether AI will transform the legal profession, but who is building it, with which values, and within which democratic and legal framework. Innovation is essential — but responsibility is non-negotiable. 

You are Noxtua’s Chief Alliance Officer, a title that isn’t quite common. What exactly do you do at Noxtua? 
 

My role as Chief Alliance Officer is to design and orchestrate the ecosystem around Noxtua. From the very beginning, we made a clear strategic choice: building a truly outstanding Legal AI cannot be done in isolation. It requires strong, long-term alliances across the legal, technological, and institutional landscape. 
 
Legal publishers are a cornerstone of this strategy, because authoritative legal data and doctrine are essential to legal-grade AI. But our alliance approach goes well beyond publishing. We work with law firms, corporate legal departments, academic institutions, technology partners, and European infrastructure providers, each contributing a critical piece of the puzzle. 
 
We don’t believe in a vertically closed model where one actor claims to do everything. Our strength lies in assembling complementary expertise. Noxtua brings deep AI and engineering capabilities; legal publishers contribute decades — sometimes centuries — of legal knowledge and trusted content; legal professionals ensure alignment with real-world practice; and our technology and infrastructure partners help us meet the highest standards of security, performance, and compliance. 
 
This ecosystem-based approach has already proven highly effective. Today, we collaborate with leading European legal publishers across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, while actively expanding partnerships with legal professionals and institutions across the continent. And this is only the beginning. 
 
Let me add one important point, because it really explains why alliances are so central to Noxtua. Europe has always been built through cooperation — by bridging differences, investing in long-term partnerships, and respecting national and legal specificities. This culture of alliance-building is part of Europe’s identity. We see it not as a constraint, but as a competitive advantage — and it directly shapes how we are building Noxtua. 

You mentioned European identity. Can you elaborate on that? What is the background and rationale behind Noxtua? 

 The initial idea behind Noxtua emerged from the European academic ecosystem, notably in Oxford and London, before leading to the company’s foundation in Berlin in 2017. The first version of what has since become Europe’s sovereign Legal AI was released in 2024. 
 
From the outset, Noxtua was conceived as a deeply European project, with a strong focus on cross-border cooperation — particularly along the French–German axis — and a broader ambition to reflect the diversity of Europe’s legal systems. Over time, this vision has expanded through partnerships and teams across the continent. 
 
Today, Noxtua has offices in Paris, Zagreb, and Munich, and works with partners from across Europe — legal publishers, practitioners, academics, and technology actors alike. This combination of local expertise and collective ambition is very European in spirit. 
 
In that sense, Noxtua is not just a technology company. It is an ecosystem project, built on cooperation, legal sovereignty, and trust. And that is not only our origin story — it is also our roadmap for the future. 

Circling back to alliances as a core of Noxtua’s strategy. How do the partnerships work? 
 

At the core of Noxtua’s alliance strategy lies a simple conviction: there can be no meaningful innovation in law without those who have built, structured, and safeguarded legal knowledge over time. Legal reasoning is deeply contextual — culturally, linguistically, and systemically. In the legal domain, a “move fast and break things” mindset simply does not work in the long run. 
 
This is why legal publishers play such a central role. Through decades — and in some cases centuries — of work, they have contributed to shaping the foundations of legal knowledge across Europe. But our alliance model goes beyond publishing alone. We deliberately build multi-layered partnerships bringing together publishers, legal professionals, academic actors, technology partners, and European infrastructure providers. 
 
These alliances are designed as a win-win-win model. Legal professionals benefit from accurate, compliant, and context-aware AI tools; partners — including publishers — benefit from the controlled and responsible integration of their expertise and content into AI systems; and Noxtua gains access to authoritative knowledge and real-world legal insight, which are essential to building legal-grade AI. 
 
Importantly, these are not arm’s-length relationships. We work very closely with our partners to co-design and build the AI solution itself, ensuring that it reflects the concrete needs of legal professionals in each jurisdiction. We integrate curated, exclusive legal data on a country-by-country basis, making Noxtua a content-based Legal AI Workspace, rooted in local legal systems while built on a shared European architecture. 
 
Each partnership reinforces a common conviction: to serve legal professionals properly, we must remain local in every jurisdiction, European by design, and global in ambition. 

What is the importance of legal data in these partnerships? Why does it have to be exclusive legal data? Why isn’t internet data enough? 

Let me put it this way: one of the defining features of legal work is precision. Lawyers are sometimes teased for debating the exact meaning of a single word — but in law, “almost right” is often simply wrong. Accuracy is not a luxury; it is the foundation of trust. 
 
An AI trained primarily on generic internet data cannot reach the level of reliability required for professional legal use. Authoritative, curated, and jurisdiction-specific legal data makes a decisive difference — not only in quality, but in accountability and compliance. 
 
For us, innovation only makes sense if it strengthens trust, empowers professionals, and protects the legal ecosystem that depends on verified knowledge. That is why exclusive legal data, combined with close cooperation with those who produce and use it, is non-negotiable. 

 
With publishing and alliance partners across Europe, is international expansion a strategic priority for Noxtua? 

From the very beginning, we have referred to Noxtua as Europe’s sovereign Legal AI — with the conviction that this could become the European Legal AI, not by imposing uniformity, but by embracing Europe’s legal diversity. 
 
International expansion within Europe is therefore a core strategic priority. We are already working with partners across multiple jurisdictions and will continue to expand this network — while at the same time deepening and broadening our alliances, not only with leading publishers, but across the wider legal and institutional ecosystem. 
 
Our ambition is clear: to scale responsibly, remain deeply anchored in local legal realities, and build a shared European alternative that is both competitive and trustworthy.

Everyone seems to be talking about European digital sovereignty right now. Why is it so important for the legal domain, and what does it actually mean? 
 

We are living in a time of profound geopolitical volatility, where Europe’s strategic choices — including digital ones — will shape its future for decades. In this context, digital sovereignty is no longer an abstract concept; it has become a concrete and urgent issue, particularly for the legal domain. 
 
At a very practical level, Noxtua is an AI solution that helps legal professionals save time, energy, and resources in their daily work. But beyond that, it operates in a much broader and more sensitive context. Alongside defense and healthcare, the legal system is one of the most critical pillars of a state, because it handles highly sensitive information and underpins the rule of law. A sovereign and independent legal system is therefore not only a professional concern — it is a cornerstone of democracy itself. 
 
This is why digital sovereignty matters so deeply in law. If legal data, legal reasoning tools, or the underlying infrastructure are not under European control, then the autonomy of our legal systems is at risk. And sovereignty cannot be reduced to marketing claims or contractual promises. It requires concrete, structural choices. 
 
That includes very practical questions: Who controls the infrastructure? Where is the data processed? Under which jurisdiction does it fall? Recent public statements — including testimony by representatives of Microsoft — have made it clear that, under certain legal frameworks, European data hosted by non-European hyperscalers may still be subject to foreign access obligations. This reality has to be taken seriously, especially in the legal domain. 
 
AI is no longer just a technological evolution. It is a matter of strategic direction, cultural intention, and democratic responsibility. For us, European digital sovereignty means building AI systems that are designed, governed, and operated in Europe, on secure infrastructure, aligned with European law, and accountable to European institutions and professionals. 
 
In other words, digital sovereignty is not a “nice to have” add-on for Noxtua — it is at the core of what we do. Precisely because we operate in such a sensitive domain, and at a time of increasing geopolitical uncertainty, we believe Europe must be able to rely on its own legal-grade AI solutions. 
 
What Noxtua is building shows that Europe can lead with its own values: legal rigor, privacy by design, professional confidentiality, and genuine technological sovereignty. 

That's a very strong conclusion. Dear Joséphine, thank you very much for taking the time to dive deeper into the strength of strategic partnerships.