The problem
Justice Education Society’s first AI chatbot, Ask JES AI, answered only family law questions. When people asked about other areas of law, it had to decline—even though JES published information on many of those topics. JES wanted to make that wider knowledge available through a chatbot, with answers grounded in trusted BC sources.
The challenge
Ask AI would draw on 20 websites run by JES and organizations such as the Residential Tenancy Branch and Legal Aid BC. Together they hold about 7,000 pages in 20 different layouts, and any page can change without notice. A missing or stale page could mean a confident wrong answer. Additionally, we had to ensure that the AI model didn't fill gaps in knowledge from its own memory, which can be out of date.
A renting question the family law chatbot would have declined. Ask AI explains the rules, links to the Residential Tenancy Branch and a TRAC template letter, and asks a follow-up question. (We asked this question ourselves.)
The solution
Tangowork built Ask AI, a custom chatbot with a full retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Our scraper updates its knowledge base from 20 websites twice a week. The system condenses each question and relevant conversation history into a search query. It retrieves matching passages and passes them to Claude to generate an answer. We integrated Langfuse to trace each step and added feedback collection so JES can review answers and flag problems. Ask AI provides general legal information alongside JES’s Ask a Human service.
Generating high quality answers took careful prompt crafting. For example, we instructed Ask AI to carefully draw dollar amounts, deadlines, and form numbers only from retrieved sources; to flag missing information; and for court questions, to clarify which court or tribunal is involved.
Tangowork also rebuilt LegalHelpBC.ca, Ask AI’s main home, using AI agents to write the code under our direction.
On Small Claims BC, Ask AI asks which court issued the document before giving a deadline. This example comes from our own testing.
The results
- 20 trusted sources, up from 1. Ask AI answers questions on family law, renting, employment, small claims, consumer and debt, and the courts. It’s free on 10 JES websites.
- 0 answers rated unsafe in pre-launch testing. JES staff and legal navigators tested hundreds of questions. They rated each answer on 6 measures, including whether it could put someone at risk.
- No duplicate content maintenance. Nobody at JES copies content into the chatbot. Our scraper checks the source websites twice a week and updates the knowledge base with changed content.
- Sources people can check. Ask AI links to source pages so people can check the information. Behind the scenes, Langfuse records each step, and JES reviews the conversations.