[Samsan Tech] Legal Buddy

Introducing Legal Buddy, a one-stop platform for users to find legal aid schemes, lawyers within their budget, and other resources to independently navigate the legal system.

Comment

Inspiration

The legal industry does not currently have many applications or websites that are easy to use. Most of the time, individuals who require legal services have to do their research over multiple platforms - this includes calling different law firms and repeating their situation over and over again.

In addition to tackling the issue of information overload for the public, we wanted to improve the process of filtering the right lawyers to clients and vice versa.

What it does

Legal Buddy Website

Employing a tinder-like approach, users would be asked to create a profile by entering key information such as the legal area and general overview of their case. Lawyers would also create a profile by entering a different set of information, such as their area of specialisation and the legal aid schemes they are volunteering under.

For the filtering function which determines which lawyers would be displayed for users to "swipe" on, we have decided to implement a machine learning (natural language processing) algorithm. Our model will find similarities in the description of the user’s case, the legal schemes that cover their cases, and the area of specialty of the lawyers on the platform. A deck of relevant lawyers and their email contact would then appear under the “Find your Lawyer” tab for users, who can then “swipe” and decide whether to contact the lawyer.

Our one-stop website also includes other information, such as the legal aid schemes for charities, NGOs, and foreigners, as well as the general cost of engaging a lawyer.

Legal Buddy Telegram Bot

For further convenience, we have linked our website to a telegram bot, which provides more assistance to users who face difficulty in discerning their eligibility and which legal schemes might benefit them. This is done through a question-and-answer bot, which will slowly narrow down to the relevant schemes, and direct them to the relevant sign-up pages.

Key Considerations

The privacy of our users is one of the main consideration for our platform. We did not want lawyers to be able to view any user information. Hence, we only made it such that only users are able to look through the list of lawyers and be the ones contacting them.

We also want to respect the time of our lawyers who have registered on the platform by ensuring that they do not get overworked or receive email spam from several users. Hence, we have implemented a function for lawyers to turn off their profile visibility so that their profile will not be shown to lawyers on the "Find Your Lawyer" page.

How we built it

We primarily utilised Flask to build the website using basic HTML and CSS codes. We also connected the website to a local server on MySQL to store and display the information from the users.

The Telegram bot and machine learning algorithm is implemented using Python and some of its modules including - ScikitLearn, python-telegram-bot.

Challenges we ran into

It was initially a struggle to connect the user registration to a database, and figure out the codes for some functions (e.g. the swiping function for "Find Your Lawyer"), but we managed to pull through in the end. There are also some backend implementations that were extremely hard to execute and debug given our minimal experience in the field.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of our end product given that we were able to produce two working prototypes (the website and the telegram bot) with minimal knowledge and limited time.

What we learned

Our team has been exposed to many concepts behind web app development which we are new to. Through this Hackathon, we learned how to code a website with interactive features using Flask, HTML and CSS.

What's next for Legal Buddy

Currently, the website only runs on a local server. As such, we hope to scale up our product and link it to cloud technologies such as AWS, so that it can run without a server.

We also hope to be able to partner with organisations providing legal aid schemes so that they are able to register their lawyers on our platform. This would give us a good number of lawyers to start with for users to match with. This would also be less tedious than having individual lawyers from the organisations signing up on their own, given their busy schedules.

Share this project:

Updates