Law and Justice meets AI
We work to bring innovators, institutions, resources and ideas across the legal and AI domain together, to create irreversible change to how citizens experience justice in India.
A Brief Timeline
Let's start at the beginning and end at the end
2021
OpenNyAI Mission Begins
OpenNyAI (‘Open AI for Justice’) began as a collaborative mission between EkStep, NLSIU, ThoughtWorks, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies with Agami acting as the anchor partner. The mission was to advance access to justice by leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
2021
Legal NLP Models Launch
Following an extensive benchmarking exercise, three NLP models have been released: Named Entity Recognition, Rhetorical Role, and Extractive Summarizer. These models, trained on approximately 1,000 legal judgments, achieved an average accuracy of 90% and were evaluated at SemEval 2022.
2022
OpenNyAI Make-A-Thon
The Make-a-thon was an 8 weeks long online challenge bringing together engineers, technologists, lawyers, designers and business professionals to create applications that use AI to improve legal services and access to justice. Participants used AI models to build products on top of AI models.
2022
KHOJ Dataset Launch
Over a two-month data collection period, approximately 40 student volunteers gathered background information on High Court Judges across 47 parameters, resulting in a comprehensive dataset of 25,000 data points. This dataset was released by the Honourable Chief Justice of India, DY Chandrachud, at NLU Odisha. This was a collaborative effort between OpenNyAI, Civic Data Lab and Centre for Public Policy, Law and Good Governance, NLU Odisha.
2022
Jugalbandi Launch
On the heels of the launch of ChatGPT, the OpenNyAI community built Jugalbandi - an open source conversational AI tech stack built atop LLMs, Bhashini and WhatsApp to provide access to critical information and services to Indian citizens. Launched at the Agami Summit in December 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and presented by Satya Nadella in May 2024.
2023
1st OpenNyAI Maker Residency
The OpenNyAI Maker Residency was five days of intense building and crafting innovative solutions to the problems of law and justice with 45+ entrepreneurs and innovators receiving guidance from 16 mentors, and collaborating with their fellow cohort members to prototype their ideas.
2023
JIVA Launch
Judges’ Intelligent Virtual Assistant (JIVA), is an AI-powered court infrastructure platform designed to help judges and legal practitioners find relevant legal information (acts, laws, and sections within them) quickly. JIVA is trained on a dataset of legal documents, including central and Karnataka statutes and regulations. Built as a prototype in collaboration with Parallel.
2024
AALAP Launch
Aalap (Assistant for Legal and Paralegal functions in India) is an instructions fine-tuned version of Mistral 7B that can perform specific legal tasks in the Indian context. Started as an experimental project by the OpenNyAI community, it highlights the strides yet to be made in the sphere of domain specific LLM development.
2024
RAG Benchmark Exercise Begins
There are currently no benchmarking datasets for RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation - the technique powering Jugalbandi) that are specific to the Indian legal system. Given that legal texts and documents differ from natural language texts, we are developing a process for benchmarking retrievers in the legal context. We aim to collaboratively construct a legal dataset spanning different types of legal questions. This exercise with student volunteers is underway.
2024
Jugalbandi Studio Release
Jugalbandi Studio is a low/no-code tool to build out AI Applications using natural language and leveraging the Jugalbandi Manager stack. It enables entrepreneurs and citizen developers to articulate their needs from AI applications in real time and construct one click deployable tools.
2024
2nd OpenNyAI Maker Residency
The 2nd edition of the Residency will focus on building DPGs which can trigger ecosystem level change in the law and justice sector. With a deep focus on two to three problem statements spanning across building participatory technology platforms for grievance redressal, scaling the capacity of paralegals and resolving environmental grievances, we aim to bring together the broad spectrum of stakeholders across these areas for real time iterative solutioning and development.
Core Team
Meet the team that keeps the engines running
Mission Contributors
Behind the mission is a large community of volunteers and collaborators
Collaborative Initiative
OpenNyAI is a collaborative mission anchored by Agami and comprised of over half a dozen organisations
Join our Community
We're nothing without our community of hundreds of innovators, judges, students, journalists, researchers, CSOs and more.
Building a Community of Innovators that further Open Digital Public Goods that transform Law and Justice
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