The Judge
The Judge is an authenticated legal intelligence workspace for researching Nigerian law. It searches a verified legal corpus, links every supported answer to exact source passages, preserves research history and citations, and keeps practitioner matters tied to the signed-in user.
Challenge
Make Nigerian legal research useful without presenting unsupported conclusions, while keeping authorities, research history, and private matter work organised around each authenticated user.
Solution
I built a Next.js workspace with account-scoped API routes, a searchable verified corpus, evidence-ranked research responses, and persistent Neon PostgreSQL records for users, matters, research sessions, and citations. When verified coverage is insufficient, the product returns a clear limitation instead of inventing an answer.
Key decisions
Require source-verified passages for every supported answer and expose the exact authority beside the response.
Keep matters, saved research, and citations account-scoped through authenticated server routes.
Use a typed relational model for users, legal documents, passages, matters, research sessions, and citations.
Outcomes
Delivered working professional and plain-language research modes with explicit coverage limits.
Added searchable authorities, persistent research history, citation trails, and private matter creation.
Next steps
Expand the reviewed Nigerian legal corpus beyond the current federal constitutional coverage.
Continue expanding authority coverage and refining collaborative research workflows.
