Inspiration
Many people recognize that keeping up with local legislation is important, yet they don't have the time or effort to regularly research what ordinances are being passed and what is happening in their community. There is no centralized database for legislation at the city level, so no existing products provide a central interface for viewing city ordinances, especially including ordinances that have are still being discussed.
What it does
Legal Seagull allows you to search for proposed and passed ordinances based on your location and the topics that are important to you, with an easy-to-read AI summary and links to official sources. In addition, it sends out a weekly email digest of ordinance updates in your city, including proposed ordinances that haven't passed yet. For further questions, you can interact with a chatbot powered by Gemma that has access to online legal documentation.
How we built it
Ordinance information was gathered with Firecrawl Agent, an open source agent that can naturally interact with websites to collect data and return structured output. This is used to navigate each city’s individual website that contains legislative updates. Each day, the agent is run to collect the newest updates for each city users are located in
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was finding a way to reliably scrape data from local legislative sites, as they each have their own user interfaces and ways of displaying legislative information.
What's next for Legal Seagull
Due to token limitations, we could only gather information for a few cities in Florida. In the future, we could scale the project nationwide, including information for many more US cities.
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