LegalEyes (Halcyon Hacks)

Our platform
Our code
Our training data

Our platform helps clients find lawyers based on their needs, quickly and affordably.

Most people do not have the luxury of having friends or family members who can help them navigate their legal issues, or a legal education for that matter. Many of them may not qualify for pro-bono aid, but still need quality and affordable legal advice and representation.

Existing legal sites like Singapore Law Advice and Asia Law Network throw the book at clients with vast databases of lawyers. Even the first step of indicating the area of law their issue falls under poses a challenge to clients. Furthermore, these platforms suffer from advertising monopolies, with several lawyers being overrepresented or over-recommended across many practice areas, by rigging their review system. All these make for inefficient brokering, which favors neither the public nor lawyers.

Our product resolves the issue of accessibility with a proprietary algorithm which (i) identifies the area of law that the client’s case falls under; (ii) recommends to the client lawyers accordingly, taking into account the lawyer’s specialisation, rate, years of experience, reviews and language proficiencies.

Our prototype utilizes Natural Language Processing to identify key phrases in our training dataset and develops a model for identification of new client input. Our model uses the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) classifier, which currently has a Jaccard score of approximately 42%. While the model is currently trained only on 800 data points, its accuracy in predicting the needs of the client based on their input will only improve with larger datasets.

The sustainability of our platform will be ensured in several ways: to accept cases, lawyers pay a flat matching fee and can pay for premium features like more tags and more traffic. Once LegalEyes has sufficient traffic and supply of lawyers, we will expand across the value-chain into services like case management, process management to increase both client and lawyer’s lifetime value and to grow our possible revenue streams. Simultaneously, we would prioritize keeping costs low for clients.