Students from St Petersburg University develop a digital assistant that can provide legal aid

The interdisciplinary team includes students Vasilii Chumachenko, Vsevolod Nikolaev, Anna Chistiakova, and Vladimir Nevzorov. The supervisor of the project is Associate Professor Vladislav Arkhipov, Head of the Department of Theory and History of State and Law at St Petersburg University.

According to the developers of the ‘DoctorJura’ project, Russian citizens under the age of 30 often complain about difficulties in obtaining legal advice. ‘We conducted a survey and studied the legal services market. It turned out that our respondents had faced unscrupulous consulting firms, the main purpose of which was to pull money out of customers,’ explained Vasilii Chumachenko, Project Manager, master’s student in the Business Law programme at St Petersburg University. The respondents also shared their negative experience: sometimes even a large lawyer’s fee does not act as a guarantee for their qualification.

The digital assistant "DoctorJura" will help to find legal aid. The service works the following way: it is enough for the user to choose a direction and answer a number of clarifying questions, and ‘DoctorJura’ will analyse the data and prepare preliminary recommendations. It is free. Yet, if the issue requires a more in-depth analysis, the next stage is a consultation with a real lawyer who will also be selected by "DoctorJura". It is important that this will be a qualified specialist with high reputation. Additionally, the consultation will be provided faster and will be cheaper for the client since the preliminary work on data collection has been automated.

The contest of interdisciplinary projects the SPbU Start-up 2022, which is organised with the support of the Endowment Fund of St Petersburg University, takes place every year. To compete for the main prize, the students and lecturers should present a high-tech business project in the following fields: Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, High-Tech Healthcare, IT, Internet of Things, or other areas. Winners of the contest receive cash prizes: 350,000 roubles for the first place, 250,000 roubles for the second, and 150,000 roubles for the third. In addition, two small innovative enterprises established together with the University on the basis of winning projects will receive two grants from the Endowment Fund of St Petersburg University to develop their companies: 1,000,000 roubles and 700,000 roubles.

‘Our target audience is young people aged 14-25 who use the Internet a lot. We also focus on users older than 40 years,’ added Vasilii Chumachenko.

There are a great number of neural networks that can be named as analogues of "DoctorJura". As a rule, those are developed by large corporations with the involvement of significant funds for training. Our digital assistant solution can be called unique because of its flexible structure and simplicity.

Vasilii Chumachenko, Project Manager, master’s student in the Business Law programme at St Petersburg University

One of the problems faced by the creators of the start-up project is the difficulty of holding the attention of users while they are filling out the questionnaire. To receive a high-quality consultation, the client has to answer all questions very carefully. However, during the tests, it became clear that the target audience of the project was used to receiving a quick result in a few clicks. It was difficult for the respondents to carefully and accurately answer all the questions in one session. The project team solves this problem by optimising the survey.