Taming the Landscape for Legal Search

“What stood out for me was just approachability, friendliness, and the flexibility to work within our budget. Pureinsights helped us find the right path without compromising quality.”

Greg Kempe, Co-founder and Head of Technology, Laws.Africa

Introduction to Laws.Africa

Laws.Africa is a non-profit organization dedicated to making African legal information freely accessible by digitizing and publishing legislative and judicial documents. Founded and headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa, the organisation serves the continent by providing access to legal resources, supporting researchers, lawyers, and the public.

Laws.Africa’s core offerings include a back-office legislation platform (Indigo), and a legal information website (LIIWeb) designed for public use. LIIWeb enables users to access legislation, court judgments and government gazettes through a searchable interface.

Business Challenge

As the volume of legal documents hosted on Laws.Africa’s websites grew to hundreds of thousands, users reported difficulty finding relevant content. Laws.Africa’s initial Elasticsearch-based solution struggled to deliver relevant results, especially when users searched for broader topics or key legal phrases rather than specific document titles. The organization sought to improve search quality and provide a better user experience but lacked the specialized search expertise required to optimize Elasticsearch effectively.

Solution

Laws.Africa engaged Pureinsights to provide guidance on how to enhance their existing search functionality. Due to budget constraints, Pureinsights adapted its approach, providing Laws.Africa’s technical team with structured consulting sessions rather than handling the implementation directly. This model allowed Laws.Africa’s team, experienced in software development, to execute the recommended changes while leveraging Pureinsights’ expertise.

The collaboration included:

• Search Maturity Assessment: Pureinsights evaluated Laws.Africa’s search capabilities and identified areas for improvement.
• Search Dashboard Implementation: With guidance from Pureinsights, Laws.Africa implemented a search performance dashboard using the open-source tool Metabase, which allowed them to track and analyse search quality metrics.
• Feature Prioritization: Laws.Africa focused on high-impact improvements including type-ahead completion and hybrid vector search. Pureinsights helped prioritize these features to deliver maximum value with minimal development time.

Implementation and Collaboration

Pureinsights worked closely with Laws.Africa’s technical team, providing templates and targeted advice that empowered them to execute improvements independently. This collaboration enhanced the team’s understanding of search optimization, enabling Laws.Africa to take ownership of their search development.

Laws.Africa implemented:

• Search Performance Dashboard: Visualized key metrics to monitor ongoing search quality improvements.
• Type-Ahead Completion: Enhanced user experience by providing real-time suggestions as users typed.
• Hybrid Vector Search (Planned): This feature will improve semantic-based search, critical for cases where user queries don’t match exact document language.

Results and Impact

The initial enhancements led to a notable improvement in search performance, especially for document title-based searches. The search dashboard enabled Laws.Africa to monitor and refine search quality over time. User feedback indicated that search relevance had improved significantly, reducing frustration among users who previously struggled to find specific legal documents.

Through Pureinsights’ guidance, Laws.Africa’s team gained valuable search expertise, boosting their confidence and capabilities to continue enhancing search independently. This partnership underscored the flexibility of Pureinsights’ consulting approach, which accommodated budgetary constraints while delivering impactful results.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, Laws.Africa plans to implement hybrid vector search to support semantic-based searching, which is expected to further improve user satisfaction. The organization is also exploring search alert features and considering additional Pureinsights services to advance their search maturity further.

Why Pureinsights

Laws.Africa chose Pureinsights due to their search expertise, domain knowledge and willingness to tailor services to the non-profit’s needs and budget. The flexibility, expertise, and collaborative approach provided by Pureinsights have enabled Laws.Africa to significantly improve their search experience while maintaining control over implementation.

“It’s not just about the deliverables that we got from the team; it’s actually been a lot more about the discussion and expertise. That has been valuable to us.”

Greg Kempe, Co-founder and Head of Technology, Laws.Africa