JusticeBot: A Methodology for Building Augmented Intelligence Tools for Laypeople to Increase Access to Justice

TL;DR

JusticeBot introduces a methodology for creating legal decision support tools that help laypeople understand and navigate their legal rights through hybrid reasoning and user interaction.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel methodology for building accessible legal decision support tools combining case-based and rule-based reasoning.

Findings

First deployed JusticeBot helped thousands of users.

The methodology effectively encodes legal rules and previous cases.

The system supports users in resolving legal issues independently.

Abstract

Laypeople (i.e. individuals without legal training) may often have trouble resolving their legal problems. In this work, we present the JusticeBot methodology. This methodology can be used to build legal decision support tools, that support laypeople in exploring their legal rights in certain situations, using a hybrid case-based and rule-based reasoning approach. The system ask the user questions regarding their situation and provides them with legal information, references to previous similar cases and possible next steps. This information could potentially help the user resolve their issue, e.g. by settling their case or enforcing their rights in court. We present the methodology for building such tools, which consists of discovering typically applied legal rules from legislation and case law, and encoding previous cases to support the user. We also present an interface to build tools using this methodology and a case study of the first deployed JusticeBot version, focused on landlord-tenant disputes, which has been used by thousands of individuals.