We are pleased to announce the publication of the paper A generative AI-based legal advice tool for small businesses in distress. This paper describes the development and evaluation of the Insolvency Bot, a legal chatbot designed to provide reliable advice on corporate insolvency in England and Wales for small business owners.
We used Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance large language models with a curated knowledge base of 6,000 legal texts, including statutes, HMRC forms, and case law.
Thomas Wood, the director of Fast Data Science, was responsible for building the system in Python and implementing the machine learning models and vector embeddings that allow the bot to retrieve relevant legal information. Fast Data Science hosts the live version of the tool on our website at https://fastdatascience.com/insolvency
We developed and tested the performance of a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system for answering legal queries related to corporate insolvency in England and Wales. The Insolvency Bot relies on open-source legal information and HMRC forms to provide sound responses to a user’s query focusing on insolvency matters regulated by English law. We evaluated our bot head-to-head on an unseen test set against the unmodified versions of large language models (LLMs) gpt-3.5-turbo, gpt-4, or gpt-4o with a mark scheme similar to those used in examinations in law schools. The Insolvency Bot outperformed each unmodified LLM (p = 0.05%). An additional user experience survey suggested the need for creating two versions of the bot, one for lay people who expect practical and actionable advice and another for professionals with the relevant legal authorities. Our legal chatbot demonstrates the benefits of combining a generative AI system with a trusted knowledge base and shows future promise to cover cross-jurisdictional and insolvency-related queries and could be further improved in its technical architecture.
More information: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/publications/a-generative-ai-based-legal-advice-tool-for-small-businesses-in-d/
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