Legal Adviser

Try out the app yourself!

Inspiration

The inspiration comes from the ideal of comprehensible and transparent law, in which laymen can easily find their way around. Our tool is meant to be a step towards explaining their rights to laymen in a simple way and giving them first impressions about the legal evaluation of their case. This should result in greater legal certainty and autonomy for legal laymen.

What it does

The Robo Advisor collects the necessary legally relevant information from its user by asking specific questions and guides the user step by step through the requirements for a wrongful termination lawsuit that has a chance of success. (In the future it can also support any other legal situation/topic.

How we built it

We made a PWA with React to achieve mobile-like UX without the overhead of writing a native app. To represent the structure/flow, we're using a tree data structure. We also have a Node (+Express) API which interacts with our storage in Azure to upload/download a json file which can hold our structure - the reason why we created these was that we had an idea to also create an "Admin interface", where the lawyers/legal people (like Caro) could easily add the questions, the possible answers, and the flow/logic of which leads to which. So the storage and the API are actually all implemented, deployed, and working, we just don't use them in the app.

Challenges we ran into

Letting the user/lawyer create any "flow"/structure for the app to use. The challenge here is how to make a UI which is easy and convenient to use, but at the same time offers this pretty complex logic/capability to create essentially an algorithm. But since we didn't really have time for this and it wasn't essential for a prototype of our app, we decided to not implement it during this hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The legal "flowchart/diagrams" which are our source of data. Data structure/algorithm for super simple "parsing"/saving of this flow structure. We also believe that the app is quite sexy.

What we learned

That it is NOT a good idea to use component libraries at a hackathon if you need ANY customization at all, because it would be much faster if you just wrote those 10 lines of CSS yourself instead of spending an hour on figuring out how to overwrite the library's CSS and what it's structure in the DOM actually is.

What's next for Legal Adviser

We can implement the "Admin panel", letting lawyers/legal people add much more flows/data, which would make our app useful in much much more situations for the users. Imagine that! Kinda like automated Stack Overflow.