Lawer

Inspiration

This project was inspired after seeing the case of my father who was falsely accused in a murder case as he is a doctor and an admitted patient died at around 1 am in the night. The patient family accused him of his death and he has to roam around Indian Judicial System which is highly unorganized for about 14 years to get justice.

What it does

An OTP login service is used so that there is no need for password management.
An extensive file storage system is provided with the help of Firebase Storage for better management of your legal files.
With Gemini's assistance, a precedent-searching system is created that produces highly relatable results based on the user-provided case.
Efficient law searching is used to provide relevant laws to the user based ont heir query. User can also provide multiple queries which are also handled efficiently using keyword searching.
The app can also used by students who are currently pursuing law in order to get various case studies for different scenarios they proivde to the app.

How we built it

We built it using Django-Rest Framework for the backend and flutter was used to provide an android front-end to our project. Firebase was used to develop file-management system and authentication system. Gemini generative AI is used for situational searching.

Challenges we ran into

The frontend started with Figma designs and seamlessly transitioned into Flutter development, leveraging its rapid development capabilities for fast paced page creation. During implementation of certain functionalities like external storage file selection, or rendering html strings of legal precedents, we would often encounter the problem of using the right package with the right versions. Flutter goes through upgrades very frequently which makes it hard for a developer to keep up, which also deprecates a lot of online resources even dating a couple of years back. The frontend team often had to refer to the documentation and cross checking the compatibility of packages before using them in the project, this slowed down the process but made the work much more streamlined.
A major challenge the team faced was making a File System inside our application, this required collaboration from both the teams working on the frontend and the backend side of the application. Together we figured out a solution in which we store the directory path as a string, and manipulated it whenever a frontend event that changed directories was called, we then shared this variable with the backend to keep track of it so that we don't loose when popping states.
The backend team started with the creation of databases with web scraping different websites, it took some time to find the right source that was open to developers. We end up using the indian kanoon website for making out database. Then the team proceeded to transfer everything to firebase cloud storage. One of the major challenges encountered by the team was providing the file to the front end interface in the form of an html string to be rendered. Initially, sending the json data byte by byte proved to be a failure, with the reference of some documentation, the team figured out that sending the data through octet streams solved the problem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Laypersons can intuitively find relevant precedents without specialized knowledge, leading to a smoother and more empowering experience.
The application becomes a valuable resource for a wider audience, bridging the gap between legal knowledge and everyday understanding.
Parameter optimization significantly enhanced the accuracy of category mapping, ensuring correct classifications within the system.
The correction of mapping errors streamlined the user experience, eliminating confusion and frustration caused by incorrect classifications.
We are really proud that we have tested our app with about 200 people and almost 93.54% of these people found it really helpful.

What we learned

We really learned some very deep information about how the law and law system works.
We also learned how generative ai works and also tried to implement a model which breaks the generative ai.
We learned Dart as this was our first time using flutter for an android front-end.

What's next for Lawer

Lawer currently operates upon Indian law database with the api of the indiankanoon.org. This application has a huge scalability and our team is soon gonna start on some of them. Some possible extensions are:-

Extension towards the legal databases of other nations, this sort of extension would require access to the the central judicial databases of other nations.
Multi language support, this will promote inclusivity and help lawer reach a larger audience. This extension will be easily achievable with the help of cloud translation api.
Multi platform support. The application is currently supported on android only, our team aims to provide multiplatform support like ios and web. Flutter's multiplatform supprt will be a huge help in this, with a little restructuring of files and referencing the documentation, we will soon make lawer available on every screen