Members: Benjamin Philipose, Nicholas McNamara, Lisa Lomidze, Devin Lim
A project completed for Large Language Models class at SeattleU, Winter Quarter 2025.
LegalEase is an AI-powered chatbot designed to assist small business owners in Washington State with legal guidance on business formation. The chatbot provides low-cost, accessible support for selecting a business structure, understanding legal requirements, and generating key legal documents.
Since this is a private repo, you need to setup GitHub authentication to clone this repo:
sudo apt install gh
BROWSER=echo gh auth login
git clone https://github.com/davay/legalease
On a fresh VM, run the initialization script:
cd CPSC5830-Team1
./initialize_vm.sh
Now you're ready to start the FastAPI server and React frontend.
The provided start.sh script will start both of them in the background.
You can check their logs in api.log or web.log -- e.g., use cat.
WARNING: On first run, the FastAPI server will take some time to download the models from HuggingFace.
./start.sh
A stop.sh script is provided to stop both the FastAPI server and frontend.
./stop.sh
NOTE: These scripts are meant to be used on Jetstream. In a Jetstream VM, sudo is password-less.