isthislegal

The problem

Legal questions are urgent, stressful and hard to answer

Most people meet the law at a difficult moment. Someone named in a report, a tenant facing eviction, a small business owner reading a contract: they need to understand where they stand, and they need to understand it now.

Getting that answer usually means searching through dense legal text that assumes you already know the terms, or waiting days and paying for a first consultation just to learn whether you have a problem at all.

General AI chatbots looked like a shortcut, but they made things worse for a law firm. They answer confidently without saying which jurisdiction they mean, they can invent rules that do not exist, and they give no assurance about what happens to the sensitive details people type into them.

Our approach

A conversation, not a legal database

We designed isthislegal around how a worried person actually asks for help. Instead of a search box and a list of statutes, the product opens with a calm, familiar conversation and a few of the questions people ask most, so nobody has to know the right legal words to begin.

Every question can be tied to a jurisdiction before it is sent. That one choice changes the answer completely, so we made it a visible part of the question rather than something hidden in settings.

Answers are generated from the firm’s own vetted legal sources, not from the open internet, and are written in plain language with the key points broken out. People can save conversations into folders and come back to them when they speak to a lawyer.

Security

Built for confidentiality from the first message

People tell a legal assistant things they would not tell anyone else, so security was a product requirement, not a feature added at the end.

Every account and conversation is private to its owner and encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is checked on every request on the server, so one user can never see another user’s chats or folders, and the firm’s staff only see what they are authorised to see.

Questions and answers are never used to train public AI models. Sessions are protected in real time with rate limiting and abuse detection, and every answer carries a clear reminder to check important information with a qualified lawyer.

How it works

Four steps from question to answer

Start from a suggested question or write your own. Choose the jurisdiction. Read a clear, structured answer drawn from trusted sources. Save it to a folder to revisit or share with your lawyer.

We kept the whole journey to a single screen on desktop and mobile, so it feels as simple as messaging, even though the retrieval, jurisdiction logic and security checks behind it are anything but.

The result

A live platform helping real people every day

isthislegal is in production and in daily use. People get a clear first answer to their legal question in seconds, at any time of day, without exposing their situation to a public chatbot.

For the firm, it handles the repetitive first questions around the clock and sends clients to their consultation already understanding the basics, so lawyers spend their time on advice rather than explanation.

Every conversation runs behind the same real-time security checks, and the platform keeps growing: new jurisdictions, new legal sources and API access for partners are added without changing the experience users already trust.