Global Access to Justice via AI & Community

The vision for the project between LegalBeagles Group Ltd (LBGroup) and IBM UK Ltd (IBM) is to provide easy access to legal answers via quality, community guidance supported by technology, which will analyse and scale knowledge to predict best routes for consumers to find solutions to legal issues.

We aim to create a new partnership between humans and technology, leveraging the strengths of both for the purpose of providing democratised legal support and innovation.

This project objective is to provide targeted legal support in a cost-effective manner, for a global population that is increasingly struggling with access to justice and consequently researching online to find answers to legal matters. We intend to design and integrate AI technology into the LegalBeagles forum, the UK's most popular free legal information site, operating for over 11 years, providing free legal guidance to consumers and with 800,000 posts providing answers to a range of legal issues. This will unlock that wealth of information and provide a scalable cognitive platform of consumer legal knowledge and insights.

Most legal sector AI innovation is currently targeted at improving the efficiency and cost effectiveness of corporate law firms, with limited direct benefit to consumers. This project offers new innovation in the form of applying AI technology to the existing LegalBeagles forum to create a new product and service, offering augmented intelligence in legal guidance and support.

The forum currently relies on a group of dedicated volunteers providing legal support to consumers. The increasing volume and complexity of legal issues requires a huge increase in corresponding dedicated volunteers in order to meet the demand for support. The use of AI offers an 'endless capacity and reach' by analysing natural language with machine learning techniques to locate knowledge faster and identify new patterns in unstructured data which was previously unseen -- whilst at the same time helping consumers with their legal issues.

This is the start of an innovative and continuously developing cognitive legal platform which over time, will enable a "bot" to answer common, less complex queries almost instantaneously. This will increase access to justice for the UK population and we know 27.3% of countries in the world (30% of the world's population) use the English Common Law system, making this model scalable for use in these new markets.