Project Odyssey - Opening the National Archive's legal data to AI for A2J

Sir Geoffrey Vos, the Master of the Rolls and President of the UK Civil Courts, stated, " "If GPT-4 (and its subsequent iterations) is going to realise its full potential for lawyers... it is going to have to be trained to understand the principles upon which lawyers, courts and judges operate... the present version of ChatGPT does not have a sufficiently reliable moral compass."

Project Odyssey addresses this multifaceted challenge in three stages: (i) by enriching the National Archives Legislation and Find Case Law primary legal datasets with machine-readable metadata to be made available to all; (ii) fine-tuning LLMs based on this enhanced data and using prompt-engineering to create standardised LLM inputs for enhanced outputs; and (iii) delivering enhanced means of accessing this legal information via an Access to Justice (A2J) app to benefit litigants in person and SMEs.

The project has a clear need due to the increasing use of ChatGPT by lawyers and wider society to create legal arguments which are currently not reliable. Without this intervention, model oversight and publicly available outputs, there is a material risk that these AI systems fail to fulfil the technology's promise to improve A2J while introducing further inefficiencies into the strained justice system.

The National Archives legal dataset is the primary source of legislation and case law data in the UK jurisdiction and this project makes this key dataset more accessible to a broad set of users for computational analysis and product development, while facilitating a carefully designed digital service to support A2J across the UK.