The HKU Law and Technology Centre has recently launched the CLIC Recommender, an innovative solution aimed at bridging the justice gap and improving access to legal information. This initiative addresses the common problem faced by many individuals who struggle to obtain relevant legal knowledge, understand their rights, and make informed decisions about their legal issues.

Since 2005, the Law and Technology Centre has been committed to making legal information on a number of legal topics that have the most direct relevance to the public accessible for free through various platforms, including the Community Legal Information Centre (CLIC), Youth CLIC, Senior CLIC, and Family CLIC. These platforms provide easily comprehensible legal content, catering to individuals who may not be familiar with legal matters.

Despite its extensive database of over 2,200 pages containing legal information, the CLIC website can be challenging to navigate for users who lack knowledge about specific legal issues or are unfamiliar with the website’s structure. As a result, finding pertinent information becomes a daunting task for many.

To address this issue, the Law and Technology Centre embarked on the AI-CLIC project in 2021, with support from the WYNG Foundation and the HKU Knowledge Exchange Fund. The project’s primary goal was to harness the power of artificial intelligence to develop the CLIC Recommender (CRec), a system designed to enhance access to relevant legal information.

CRec leverages AI technology to intelligently guide users to the appropriate legal information based on their specific needs and circumstances. Users simply input a description of their situation into CRec. By incorporating AI algorithms, CRec can efficiently analyze user inputs, identify relevant legal issues, and suggest pertinent legal questions and CLIC pages to address their concerns. This not only simplifies the process of finding legal information but also empowers individuals to make better-informed decisions about their legal situations.

CRec is available at https://clic.org.hk/app/recommender. Feel free to explore and utilize this valuable resource! Please also visit the e-donation form for CLIC here.