August 6, 2025
Beagle+, our chatbot powered by generative AI, continues to attract interest as a leading use of artificial intelligence in delivering public legal education. The People's Law team was recently invited to showcase Beagle+ at conferences in Chicago and New York.
In May, we presented a paper at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law hosted by Northwestern University in Chicago. Our digital and content lead Drew Jackson walked attendees through how we used a testing dataset to improve the accuracy and helpfulness of Beagle+. We made this dataset public to help other access to justice organizations on their journeys in AI development.
Then in mid-July, we shifted gears for Practising Law Institute's Artificial Intelligence in Law Practice 2025 program in New York City. Content developer David Kandestin spoke on two panels that focused on generative AI use cases and the tools used to build, customize and evaluate performance. Conference participants learned how our nimble non-profit is on the cutting edge of AI chatbot development in the legal education space.
Telling the Beagle+ story in these two distinct settings — academia and Big Law — gives us the opportunity to collect meaningful feedback from different peer groups. At both conferences, we pulled back the curtain on our development process and showcased the software tools and methodologies we use to create and continuously test the Beagle+ system.
To date, our team of lawyers has reviewed every Beagle+ conversation for accuracy and helpfulness. We're now piloting Langfuse, another AI application, to assess Beagle+'s performance alongside our human review process (AI testing AI, essentially!). This approach means we can continue to monitor Beagle+ and over time reduce our reliance on manual review, paving the way to a safe, effective, and scalable content delivery tool that can reach more British Columbians.