Team Name

Team SnakeAI

Team Members

Project Description

Existing Problem: Information overload hinders law accessibility.

• Every year, approximately 437,000 new businesses are established in Australia.
• Small and medium-sized business owners face significant challenges navigating complex paperwork, legal requirements, and council-specific regulations when starting their businesses.
• Instead of focusing on growing sales and scaling operations, entrepreneurs often spend crucial time and resources deciphering complicated government documents and compliance processes.
• This inefficiency creates barriers that slow down innovation and hinder overall business growth.

Local Legal is the solution

Local Legal is an AI-powered search tool designed to help business owners easily find and understand Government laws and regulations relevant to their businesses.

How it works -

1. The system retrieves accurate information from government databases using a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system to answer user questions.
2. It switches to an agent mode when needed, performing web searches and summarizing external content.
3. It automatically fills PDF forms with the gathered data and presents the completed file to the user.

Empowering Communities

1. Saves Time: Quickly finds relevant laws and regulations, reducing hours spent manually searching through complex documents.
2. Improves Understanding: Simplifies legal language and presents clear explanations, helping business owners better grasp their legal obligations.
3. Reduces Costs: Minimizes the need for costly legal consultations by providing accurate, accessible information directly.
4. Enhances Decision-Making: Helps businesses make informed choices by delivering comprehensive and up-to-date legal insights tailored to their needs.

Technical Details

• Developed in Python: The code is available in Github with all the details about how to run the app in your local system.
• AI Model: Used Open source AI model named Llama by Meta
• Context Awareness and Memory: Local Legal understands and consider the situation or background of a query, enabling more accurate and relevant responses and memory enables the model to retain information across interactions.
• Ethical and Responsible use of AI: The model is trained on Government data without any bias

What’s next for us (Local Legal)?

• The portal will soon be launched for a single council(eg. City of Melbourne) initially, with a gradual rollout planned to include additional councils over time.
• This will be a "freemium" model for start. A few free searches per month, then a subscription ($10/month) for unlimited searches and access to more complex areas like planning scheme overlays. You could also have a B2B tier for architects or builders who need this information constantly.

Data Story

Open data is extracted from different government legislative websites ( https://www.legislation.gov.au, https://www.grants.gov.au/Go/List, etc). These reports are published in pdf format and even extracted the text that's in HTML format and then transformed with AI to be more succinct and focus on a specified issue of interest.