The Ministry of Legal and Constitutional Affairs (MLCA) sought to improve the Legal Information Portal of Jamaica (LIPJ) to provide citizens, stakeholders, and international partners with better access to Acts of Parliament, Jamaica Gazette publications, and other legal documents.
The previous LIPJ version was outdated, difficult to use, and lacked a functional search feature. It had technical limitations that hindered the implementation of essential functionality and imposed constraints on document uploads, resulting in fewer documents available than anticipated.
The goal of the project was to improve public access to Jamaican laws, educate citizens on legal matters, assist in finding legal information, and offer a platform to express opinions and inquire about legal questions through live support.
Under the supervision of the Planning Institute of Jamaica, Softengi modernized the country’s Legal Information Portal in accordance with Vision 2030 Jamaica – National Development Plan, which aims to foster an open, accountable, inclusive, and effective justice system. The project was supported by the World Bank’s Foundation for Competitiveness and Growth Project (FCGP), which seeks to strengthen the Jamaican business environment and improve private sector competitiveness.
After the initial stage of redesigning LIPJ in line with modern UX/UI standards, Softengi digitized more than 10,000 existing physical legal documents, from 17th-century historical records to current Acts of Parliament, using OCR, indexed them in a vector database, and enabled the client to upload additional records.
With the portal’s foundation in place, Softengi implemented the core functionality that transformed LIPJ into an intelligent legal information platform. Beyond advanced search, online support, and community discussions, AI chat became the cornerstone of the new user experience.
The Claude-powered chatbot understands user questions in natural language, searches for relevant legal sources via a RAG pipeline, and generates structured answers based on the retrieved legal context through a conversational interface.
Implementing the AI chat required a dedicated architecture to retrieve, interpret, and generate answers from the portal’s legal knowledge base. At the current stage, LIPJ’s chatbot uses the Claude Sonnet 5 model because it demonstrates strong performance in understanding complex legal questions, summarizing retrieved content, and producing clear answers in a user-friendly format. It is also suitable for production in terms of response speed and cost-efficiency.
While the Claude Sonnet 5 model acts as the reasoning and answer-generation layer, it does not rely solely on general knowledge. Response generation is based on context retrieved from relevant legal documents, reducing AI hallucinations and ensuring legally accurate answers. The legal data, document indexing, retrieval logic, and user interface are handled by the surrounding application architecture developed by Softengi.
For Jamaican government leaders, LIPJ represents a major milestone in the digital transformation of justice. The portal serves as a centralized access point for vital legal information, aligning with Jamaica’s broader goals of enhancing the business environment and promoting private-sector-led growth outlined in the Foundations for Competitiveness and Growth Project (FCGP).
By leveraging a modern technology stack, a well-designed architecture, and pre-built services, Softengi accelerated the LIPJ modernization timeline from a year to four months, including User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Following the launch of LIPJ, the Ministry of Legal and Constitutional Affairs observed measurable improvements in user engagement, service efficiency, and citizen experience.
- Email inquiries reduced by 45%
- Monthly portal users increased by 38%
- Citizen satisfaction increased from 4.0 to 4.7/5
- Average response time reduced from 2 days to under 30 seconds
