Legal mouse: Deciphering the Law, One Click at a Time.

Inspiration Legal research in Nigeria is often locked behind expensive paywalls or buried in dense, Latin-heavy textbooks that are inaccessible to the average student and citizen. We were inspired by the idea of "Humanizing the Law"—taking the "scary" out of legal jargon and creating a companion that makes justice feel reachable for everyone, regardless of their background.

What it does LegalMouse is an AI-powered accessibility platform that simplifies the legal landscape. It features a Daily Legal Insight engine that rotates through 250+ Latin maxims, a structured Authorities Hub for Nigerian Statutes and Landmark Cases, and a student-focused Notes Manager. It categorizes complex laws into intuitive layers, allowing users to find exactly what they need in seconds.

How we built it We built LegalMouse using a modern, high-performance tech stack:

Frontend: Next.js and Tailwind CSS for a sleek, responsive, and professional UI.

Backend: Supabase (PostgreSQL) for a robust database architecture.

Storage: Supabase Storage to host and serve official legal PDFs and Word documents.

Automation: Python scripts were used to parse 250+ legal maxims from raw documents and inject them directly into our SQL database for the daily rotation logic.

Challenges we ran into The biggest hurdle was the data engineering. We faced several "Failed to Fetch" and "File Size" errors when trying to upload hundreds of legal documents and cases to the cloud. We also had to solve the logic for "Daily Insights"—ensuring that the Latin maxims didn't just appear randomly, but synced across all users to change exactly once every 24 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of We are incredibly proud of the Authorities Hub. We successfully implemented a dynamic filtering system that groups statutes and cases by their specific legal sub-types (like "Tort/Negligence" or "Constitutional/Electoral"). Seeing a raw list of 250+ Latin terms successfully transform into a rotating, beautiful UI component on the home page was a major win for the team.

What we learned This project taught us the importance of Database Schema Design. We learned that for a legal app to be useful, the data structure must be as organized as a law library. We also deepened our knowledge of SQL, particularly in managing relational data and handling batch inserts for large datasets.

What's next for LegalMouse: Deciphering the Law, One Click at a Time. The next step is the integration of LexiAssist, an AI-powered chat interface that will allow users to ask questions directly about specific clauses in the Nigerian Constitution. We also plan to add a "Legal Templates" section where users can generate basic legal documents like NDAs and Tenancy Agreements automatically.

Built With

• javascript
• next.js
• python
• sql
• supabase
• vercel