JES Ask AI

Justice Education Society (JES) has deployed a beta “Ask AI” assistant on FamilyLawInBC.ca to help the public find clear, jurisdiction-specific information on separation, divorce, parenting, support, and related processes. The system is closed-domain: it is grounded exclusively in the website’s legally reviewed content, with prompt and code safeguards tuned through multiple testing rounds to prioritize accuracy and avoid unsafe or speculative responses. The intent is to give people quick, on-book guidance while keeping answers constrained to vetted materials.

The AI assistant is complemented by an “Ask a Human” channel staffed on weekdays from 11:00–14:00 (local peak site hours). Outside those hours, inquiries are queued and typically receive a response within two business days. JES is integrating AI chat transcripts into its Zendesk ticketing workflow so that human navigators can see the user’s prior questions and the assistant’s responses, reducing re-triage and improving continuity of service.

Early feedback from both site visitors and JES legal help navigators has been positive, with reports of faster wayfinding and fewer clarifying back-and-forths. JES continues to refine prompts and guardrails based on real usage, aiming to maintain high fidelity to the underlying content while expanding coverage as pages are updated.

Since December 2024, JES has managed the Family Law in BC website (originally developed by Legal Aid BC). JES is a non-profit public legal education and justice-system capacity-building organization with three decades of programming in Canada and internationally. The “Ask AI” assistant extends JES’s mission by providing an always-on, jurisdiction-bounded entry point to reliable family-law information, backed by human support when questions require nuance or follow-up.