Beagle+

Beagle+ is an AI legal information chatbot developed by People’s Law School in British Columbia, in partnership with TangoWork. Launched in early 2024, Beagle+ provides residents of BC with accessible, plain-language responses to civil legal questions, drawing exclusively from trusted legal content. It is available on the People’s Law School website and through Facebook Messenger.

Beagle+ was designed to address persistent access-to-justice challenges in Canada, where many individuals face legal problems without access to legal advice. The chatbot provides users with real-time guidance on topics such as employment rights, wills, family law, and tenancy. It integrates GPT-4 with a vector database (Pinecone) populated with curated, regularly updated content from People’s Law School and other reliable BC legal sources.

The chatbot’s architecture uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground its responses in verified legal material. A nightly web crawler updates its database, ensuring that the legal information remains current. When a user submits a query, Beagle+ retrieves the most relevant content and feeds it into the language model to generate a response, reducing the risk of hallucinations and jurisdictional errors.

The Beagle+ system also includes:

• Context management to simulate conversational memory by including prior messages in each user prompt.
• Prompt refinement to improve accuracy—raising correct legal response rates from 70% (pre-launch) to 99%.
• Manual and AI-assisted oversight, with over 5,300 conversations reviewed by legal professionals, and systems in place to flag potentially problematic answers for further review.

Since launch, Beagle+ has engaged with over 65,500 users. Internal evaluations show that 99% of responses have been legally accurate, and 79% of users rated the tool as helpful. The tool has demonstrated particular strength in simplifying legal concepts, calculating entitlements, and generating custom legal letters in the organization’s tone and format.

Beagle+ was featured at several 2025 national events, including the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference and the AI Policy Consortium of the National Center for State Courts, where it was presented alongside AVA (Alaska’s virtual legal assistant). These sessions explored both the user-facing outcomes and the underlying system architecture of modern legal chatbots.

Technical Summary

• Model: OpenAI GPT-4 (upgraded from GPT-3.5)
• Architecture: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Database: Pinecone vector database for legal content retrieval
• Update Mechanism: Daily web crawling and automatic vector reindexing
• Languages Supported: English (with plans for multilingual support)
• Oversight: Hybrid review using LLMs to flag risk and humans to audit accuracy

Use Cases

• Employment rights (e.g., resignation letter drafting)
• Government benefits (e.g., EI calculations)
• Estate planning (e.g., wills and jurisdictional complications)
• Landlord-tenant law
• Consumer law
• General legal education

Access & Use

Beagle+ is available publicly at https://www.peopleslawschool.ca

Beagle+ is not a legal advice tool. It provides legal information only, and users are advised to consult a lawyer for specific legal advice.