LegalRes: An Intelligent, Fairness-Aware Legal Services Platform

Abstract

Finding and booking a lawyer remains surprisingly difficult for most people — not because lawyers are scarce, but because the systems connecting them to clients are broken. This paper introduces LegalRes, a web platform built on Next.js and React that takes a fresh approach to this problem. Rather than building another directory, we designed a fairness-aware matchmaking engine, an automated Legal Rights Education Hub, a conflict-detecting scheduler, and an AI-powered triage chatbot that helps users understand their situation before they even speak to a lawyer. Because we wanted the platform to be freely deployable, we tested four LLM APIs — Gemini 1.5 Flash, GPT-4o Mini, Mistral 7B Instruct, and LLaMA 3 8B — against legal triage prompts and picked the best performer. Gemini 1.5 Flash came out on top across accuracy, hallucination rate, speed, and context handling. The platform also uses regex-based Bar Council ID verification and role-based access control to keep the marketplace trustworthy on both sides.