Nobody likes to wait months for a decision from the authorities. But new legal requirements have often meant complicated forms, manual checks, and long processing times. The Rulemapping Group is taking a radical new approach to change this. Their Law as Code approach transforms laws and administrative processes into executable program code. In other words, rules and regulations are translated as digital rule-maps in context, and this is done so precisely that computers can read and apply them directly. Even changes to legislation can be entered using drag and drop, and it is possible to work on procedures collaboratively. Above all, more than one office can work on the procedure at the same time – an invaluable advantage when you consider that it currently takes an average of four years to obtain approval for a wind turbine because up to 24 specialist authorities process paper files one after the other, stated Till Behnke, one of the managing directors.

Rule maps are based on no-code technology and can be configured without programming to keep laws and regulations up to date. In order to really make an impact on a large scale, rule maps including an editor are to be made available as open source programs. In administration, Rulemapping also creates the basis for the sensible use of artificial intelligence (AI) because it can provide support where data is unstructured or decisions are complex.

In addition to his teaching activities, he founded a company because he did not see sufficient opportunities to promote his idea at the university. Tilo Wend was on board right from the start, initially as a third-semester law student and then quickly as the managing director responsible for the further development of the technology. Over the years, there have always been various areas in which the rule map has been used to good effect, including mass proceedings such as Toll Collect or the diesel scandal, in which hundreds of thousands of lawsuits were processed and filed in a very short time with the help of the software.

For a question about another project, in 2022 Breidenbach turned to Rafael Laguna de la Vera, founding director of SPRIND, on recommendation. They chatted and ended up talking about breakthrough innovations – interest was aroused on both sides. Breidenbach later submitted his idea to SPRIND, followed by an initial validation of the rule map. And then, as life would have it, Breidenbach said, Till Behnke, a social entrepreneur with whom he had already launched the charitable donation platform betterplace.org 18 years ago, was able to spare some time. Benke, Ina Remmers, and Matthes Scheinhardt had withdrawn from running the neighborhood platform nebenan.de, which they founded in 2023, and caught fire for rule mapping. The trio joined forces, with co-founder Dirk Woywood bringing many years of operational and technological expertise on board – and since then the new, diverse management team has dedicated itself entirely to Rulemapping. They are all experienced business people who, although they say they no longer camp out in the office, bring all the more expertise and composure in the face of world-changing visions.

We joined when it came to scaling the whole thing and were very happy to answer the call of the Professor, as we affectionately call him. The integration of AI and digital process automation was invented in the autumn of 2023, which meant that a language model and the rule map could be combined, said Behnke, that was and is the only way in the world to get the only correct answer from AI without it hallucinating. The patent application is pending.