Reducing response times to citizen legal questions across Africa

Fellows: Kasun Amarasinghe, Carlos Caro, Nupoor Gandhi, Raphaelle Roffo

Technical Mentor: Maren Eckhoff

Project Manager: Sam Short

Project Partners: BarefootLaw

BarefootLaw​, a not for profit organisation in Uganda, provides free first-line legal aid to hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise have no access to lawyers. Through innovative use of digital technology, BarefootLaw empowers people to develop legal solutions for their justice needs. 

Requests come in via many channels and are processed first by paralegals or assistant lawyers who categorize them, annotate the issues at hand, and draft responses. These draft responses are then checked and approved for final delivery to the beneficiary by head lawyers. 

Using historical data and machine learning algorithms, we will provide potential responses to a request; this will reduce the need for paralegals or assistant lawyers to draft responses from scratch, which will increase capacity and efficiency to allow more people to be served, and the organization to scale up further.