Mina: A Multilingual LLM-Powered Legal Assistant Agent for Bangladesh for Empowering Access to Justice

TL;DR

Mina is a multilingual AI legal assistant tailored for Bangladesh that leverages LLMs and retrieval techniques to provide affordable, context-aware legal support, demonstrating high accuracy and significant cost reduction.

Contribution

The paper introduces Mina, a novel multilingual LLM-based legal assistant for Bangladesh, addressing language and jurisdiction barriers with a RAG-based framework and achieving human-level performance.

Findings

Mina scored 75-80% on Bangladeshi legal exams, matching or surpassing human performance.

Mina reduces legal consultation costs by over 99%, making legal advice more accessible.

The system demonstrates effective multilingual legal reasoning and document generation.

Abstract

Bangladesh's low-income population faces major barriers to affordable legal advice due to complex legal language, procedural opacity, and high costs. Existing AI legal assistants lack Bengali-language support and jurisdiction-specific adaptation, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we developed Mina, a multilingual LLM-based legal assistant tailored for the Bangladeshi context. It employs multilingual embeddings and a RAG-based chain-of-tools framework for retrieval, reasoning, translation, and document generation, delivering context-aware legal drafts, citations, and plain-language explanations via an interactive chat interface. Evaluated by law faculty from leading Bangladeshi universities across all stages of the 2022 and 2023 Bangladesh Bar Council Exams, Mina scored 75-80% in Preliminary MCQs, Written, and simulated Viva Voce exams, matching or surpassing average human performance and demonstrating clarity, contextual understanding, and sound legal reasoning. Even under a conservative upper bound, Mina operates at just 0.12-0.61% of typical legal consultation costs in Bangladesh, yielding a 99.4-99.9\% cost reduction relative to human-provided services. These results confirm its potential as a low-cost, multilingual AI assistant that automates key legal tasks and scales access to justice, offering a real-world case study on building domain-specific, low-resource systems and addressing challenges of multilingual adaptation, efficiency, and sustainable public-service AI deployment.