Justice in a Flash

Inspiration

We were inspired by stories of people who, after learning they were due for increases in child support and alimony after a divorce, were left with the only choice of hiring an attorney that costs hundreds of dollars just for a consultation. We believed we could build an application that can create real value in short meetings with attorneys, giving an advantage to those who are already in unfortunate situations.

What it does

This project turns court documents and natural language into formal legal texts, allowing a normal person to do a self-representation filing in minutes, replacing the long and arduous process of filling out multiple forms online.

How we built it

We used React for the frontend and LLM providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Groq to implement text-to-speech, speech-to-text, pdf parsing, and document creation. We modeled our application workflow on the existing process for enforcement petitions, finding solutions to problems we found along the way.

Challenges we ran into

We realized early on that the fact that LLM's hallucinate would be a big issue if we wanted to create documents used in the legal world. To address this, we ensured that the final outputs were not fully LLM creations, but were filled in using confirmed information, and we ensured that information could be sourced back to the original documents when possible. We also made the document creation process only function when we knew that we had all the required information, ensuring no documents created were missing necessary information and would thus be rejected in the legal world.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our integration with multiple technologies and our ability to address a real problem in such a short amount of time.

What we learned

We learned how to integrate text-to-speech and speech-to-text models in a project as well as ways to minimize LLM hallucinations by not relying on the output of an LLM to always be correct.

What's next for Justice in a Flash

We hope to add multi-language support, three more Illinois counties., and pilot with one legal-aid clinic for closed-loop attorney review, if we find this project has potential for more.