Counsel

Inspiration

We've all rented in big cities and dealt with bad landlords. The hardest part was never the problem itself, it was not knowing our rights or how to push back. NYC has strong tenant protections, but they're buried in legal language most people can't parse. We built Counsel to change that.

What it does

Counsel is an AI-powered legal advocate for NYC tenants. Describe your housing situation in plain English (or speak it in your language), and Counsel will analyze your legal rights, pull real-time violation data for your building, generate a formal complaint letter, and give you a step-by-step action plan.

How we built it

We used Next.js and Tailwind for the frontend, and Claude to analyze tenant situations against NYC housing law and generate complaint letters. We integrated the Linkup API to pull live HPD building violation data, BizCrush for real-time multilingual voice input in 11 languages, and jsPDF so users can download their complaint letter directly from the browser.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the AI to produce legally grounded, citation-accurate output consistently was the hardest part. We also had to carefully handle real-time voice streaming while keeping the experience smooth and fast.

Accomplishments we’re proud of

The multilingual voice input felt extremely important. A Spanish or Mandarin-speaking tenant can speak their situation out loud and get the same quality of output as anyone else. That accessibility matters a lot to us, as each of our team-members come from immigrant families of varying backgrounds.

What we learned

We learned NYC actually has strong tenant protections, but most people just don't know they exist. Building a tool like this made us realize how much of the legal system is inaccessible not because the rights aren't there, but because the information isn't.