- My AI Lawyer is an AI chatbot trained on 20 years of South African legal cases.
- The chatbot, found on WhatsApp, gives South African-specific legal advice for a nominal fee.
- It uses OpenAI’s technology with Microsoft Azure for data security.
Launched to make legal advice more inclusive for South Africans, the My AI Lawyer chatbot from Legal&Tax is trained on the company’s 20-year history of real local legal cases and situations to give contextually accurate advice.
The chatbot, available on WhatsApp, won a 2024 Partner of the Year Award from Microsoft, with Africa president Lillian Barnard saying “We believe this technology can give us an upward trajectory when it comes to the African economy.“
A startup from Johannesburg, Legal&Tax trained the chatbot, using OpenAI’s LLMs – notably GPT 4o and GPT 4o mini, on scores of South African legal data and secured this data using Microsoft’s Azure AI system.
This means that “the data is not available to the public, or trained by the public or accessible to other large LLM providers,” explains Dean Erasmus, chief data officer for Microsoft Africa. Erasmus spoke to the media about AI security at a Microsoft AI security roundtable that took place on Tuesday.
While South Africa may seem like it is lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to generative AI solutions, companies like Legal&Tax are using the technology to find solutions to real local problems.
“We have empathy in the model that engages your situation,” Erasmus adds. “Whether you’re a woman dealing with a gender-based violence situation and have to go to the police station, which is a scary thing, and giving that individual clear guidance on what to say to the warrant officer when they walk in.”
“Or whether my neighbour is asking this tool what they should do because I’m playing my music too loud at 22:00 on a Sunday night.”
My AI Lawyers gives legal advice with the South African context in mind, making it a quick and easy reference tool that is more informed about local laws than the normal ChatGPT, for example.
“In South Africa, the law allows for the use of reasonable force to protect yourself or others from harm. However, the use of that force must be proportionate to the threat that is faced,” it told us when we asked it about a famous legal quandary in the country.
If the AI’s advice is not to your liking or not really helpful, there is also an option to connect to a chat with a real person from Legal&Tax to help you with your questions. The company also said it decided to bring the chatbot to WhatsApp to reach more South Africans than if it was an app or a website.
Microsoft believes that My AI Lawyer solves the problem of expensive legal fees and language disconnects.
“We have millions of people who do not have access to a lawyer, mostly because of cost but also because of language. This AI lawyer is available in a bunch of our local languages,” says Erasmus.
However, it doesn’t mean that the chatbot is free. In fact, you only get two free questions before you have to pay a monthly subscription fee of R50 to continue using My AI Lawyer. Like many other AI solutions, it feels like we’re on the cusp of something special with My AI Lawyer, but we’re just not there yet.
[Image – Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash]
