Policy

LawLink – the first chatbot for free legal advice is ready to help

Free professional legal advice in a few minutes is a real service available to all Ukrainians in Ukraine and around the world through the LawLink chatbot. This was reported by the Legal Development Network, which created and is developing this chatbot, Komersant ukrainskyi reports.

What makes LawLink special

According to its developers, this chatbot works in the format of open questions and answers. That is, users receiving comprehensive answers to their legal questions may not even notice that they are communicating with a bot, not a real person – an experienced lawyer.

Besides, anyone who has ever used a chatbot knows how tedious it can be: you have to go through a series of questions in a yes-no structure or by choosing from a list until the system provides (or doesn’t provide) the expected answer to your query. With the LawLink chatbot, everything is easier: you write a detailed open-ended question and get a detailed answer.

“You can communicate with the LawLink bot just like with a person: you don’t have to choose a lot of options to get to the point where you can ask a question or get information,” says Daria Kovalchuk, director of legal services at the Legal Development Network.

“The bot takes into account all the additional characteristics that you provide in your request (marital status, social category of citizens, benefits, etc.),” adds Regina Barkhan, chief legal designer of the LawLink bot, representative of the NGO Legal Innovations. – “So the more details the user provides, the better the chatbot will formulate a response, taking into account all the nuances. It’s just like with a lawyer: the more frankly you talk about the case, the better help the lawyer will provide.”

What issues does LawLink advise on

The bot currently contains complete legal information on four topics

– compensation for property damaged during the war

– land lease

– inheritance issues;

– alimony.

“One topic covers 40-60 different consultations, each of which is about 150 A4 pages in 11-point font size. This is the information that was processed by our lawyers, who tried to cover all the points that may be directly or indirectly related to the question of our potential users,” says Daria Kovalchuk.

Regina Barkhan explains how this is possible: “We maintain a single knowledge base, which is used by the Large Language Model (a type of machine learning for natural language processing) to analyze and provide answers. As a result, the user receives complete answers, and it is easy for administrators to introduce new topics, expand knowledge, and fill the chatbot’s database.”

In other words, the bot is easy to use and administer, which opens up great prospects for further improvement, expansion of opportunities, partnerships and access platforms.

How LawLink differs from Сhat GPT

Regina Barkhan, chief legal designer of LawLink bot and representative of the NGO Legal Innovations, jokingly calls LawLink_bot a GPT chat that became a lawyer.

According to the developers, in general, LawLink is like Chat GPT, only better. While Chat GPT takes information from the entire Internet, LawLink_bot takes information only from sources identified by experts and added to its system, and validates the data using a special protocol.

“Many articles that GPT chat can refer to may come from the Russian-language field or from translated English sources. It does not recognize the context and does not filter out the legislation that should be prioritized. GPT chat uses everything that is available on the Internet, and we understand that no one removes old articles from the network, does not verify the data written, and it is not known what level of expertise the authors of those articles have. Whereas the LawLink_bot database is exclusively the work of specialized lawyers who have collected up-to-date information verified by law and practice,” says the chief legal designer.

LawLink_bot also provides up-to-date data based on legislative changes and court practices and issues ready-to-sign documents at the request of users: you sign, print, and send them where necessary.

Today, LawLink_bot is available on Telegram and will soon be available on Facebook, Viber, and the Network’s website.

What is known about the Legal Development Network?

It is a union of civil society organizations that promote people-centered justice by providing free legal aid, legal education, research, strategic advocacy and other legal empowerment tools.

The Legal Development Network started its activities in 2009 as an informal coalition of grassroots civil society organizations that united to improve access to justice for community residents.

Today, the union brings together organizations from most regions of Ukraine. On their basis, the Network’s offices have been established to provide basic information on legal issues to the public, actively cooperate with local governments to research and solve community problems, introduce alternative ways of resolving conflicts, and develop communities and local leadership.

The range of legal issues addressed by the Network’s lawyers is wide: land, labor, social, and family cases. Much attention is paid to solving the problems of internally displaced persons and combatants.

The Legal Development Network also implements a number of initiatives important for community development, such as the “Legal Community” and “Vulyk Zmistiv”, and conducts research in the area of access to justice and legal capacity building.