Eskwai for Students: Generative AI Assistant for Legal Education in Ghana

TL;DR

This paper presents Eskwai for Students, a generative AI assistant designed to support Ghanaian law students by providing legal answers grounded in a large curated database, evaluated over 30 months with thousands of users.

Contribution

It introduces a retrieval augmented generation system tailored for legal education in Ghana, with real-world deployment and analysis of student interactions and ethical considerations.

Findings

Eskwai answered 32,000 queries from 3,100 students.

Students used Eskwai for diverse legal questions, highlighting its practical utility.

The study identified ethical concerns related to AI use in legal education.

Abstract

Recent advances in generative AI have shown their potential to be leveraged for legal education. Yet, work on the development and deployment of such systems for legal education in the Global South is limited. In this work, we developed Eskwai for Students, a generative AI assistant to help law students with their legal education. Eskwai for Students is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system that provides answers to a wide range of legal questions for law students grounded in a curated database of over 12K case laws and 1.4K legislation in Ghana. We deployed Eskwai for Students in a longitudinal study of 30 months (2.5 years) used by 3.1K law students in Ghana who made 32K queries. We evaluated the helpfulness of our AI, and provided insight into the kinds of queries law students submit to this generative AI tool, which raises some ethical concerns. This work contributes to an understanding of how law students in the Global South are using generative AI for their studies and the ways it could be leveraged responsibly to advance legal education.