Introducing judy.legal
judy.legal is the comprehensive database of African case law and legislations, with a focus on African Common Law countries. Currently, the judy.legal database consists of over 50,000 cases and thousands of legislations from both Ghana and Nigeria.
Why judy.legal?
Each year, more than 75,000 case judgments are delivered by African courts, however, only 20% of these judgments are digitized or published. This means the remaining 80% are forever stuck in filing cabinets and in some instances, lost forever. Digitizing the cases is only half the battle though, because the digitized cases exist in raw, unstructured formats, making it difficult for researchers to navigate and derive insights from past cases.
Legal researchers currently "hack it" by combing through hundreds of published cases and statutes. They are often reliant on old law report editions, many of which are out of print and quickly deteriorating. It's a race against time.
We've digitized 50,000+ cases from appellate courts in Ghana and Nigeria. Since the cases required additional formatting, we built the necessary tooling for our lawyers to edit, format and annotate principles established in each case.
We then use our lawyers' annotations as labelled training data (over 10,000 data points) to develop insights for end users, e.g. finding cases with similar principles.
For Law Students
JUDY has been purposefully built with the law student in mind. In Nigeria, JUDY is the exclusive partner to the Law Students Association of Nigeria (LAWSAN) and has entered into a long-term agreement to provide access to LAWSAN's 55,000 members across 50+ Nigerian universities. Every quarter, we conduct extensive usability tests to ensure the optimal user experience for our users.
Recognition
JUDY, along with 19 other leading tech companies in Africa, was selected for the 2020 "Google For Startups" Africa Accelerator. We are also supported by the Switzerland-based Meltwater Foundation. In addition, JUDY was a finalist for the 2019 African Legal Awards in the categories of Innovation of the Year and Best Use of Technology.