Digitization of Laws from African Countries

Student: Anselme Mucunguzi, 2017-2018

Countries in the developed world can leverage Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg Law for legal research when dealing with legal matters. Although the African continent has been developing quickly over the last decade, there is still no modern platform to facilitate legal research for individuals or companies. This project seeks to address the lack of such a modern tool to facilitate legal research about African jurisdictions. The first objective of the project is to validate the need for such a legal research system. If the need is validated, the project will suggest a design and a commercialization roadmap. To avoid issues that may result from scarcity of raw data, the project will only focus on the most readily available legal documents i.e. legislation. The purpose of the project is to enable legal experts from academic and non-academic settings to find relevant legal answers and documents from African nations quickly and reliably.

This project is comprised of two main parts. The first part will cover technical aspects including, but not limited to, converting unstructured raw data to structured data and building the core question-answering system. The second part will consist of business aspects including customer validation, launch strategy, and financial forecasts to name a few.