Aura: An AI-Powered Legal Assistant for Enhancing Access to Justice in the UK Legal System

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly changing the way solicitors practice law, offering affordable and scalable solutions for tasks such as analysing cases, legal research and drafting documents. This paper proposes Aura (https://www.auralaw.uk/), an AI-enabled legal assistant, designed to improve efficiency and accessibility of UK legal practice. Aura is based on natural language processing (NLP) and trained on legal corpora specific to UK law (including statutes, case law and practice rules), and automates several core solicitors' functions, including reviewing contracts, retrieving precedents, and drafting and advising clients. We examine Aura's activities for simulated litigation and transactional workflows while determining its accuracy, 'good law' status and adherence to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). The paper also reports that Aura obtained over 99% efficiency in classification of documents and that it demonstrated 93% lower time spent on initial assessments compared to the traditional method. User feedback, legal and community partners, reported qualitative improvements in accessibility, consistency, and responsiveness through legal service delivery with Aura. Users reported that Aura helped eliminate repetitive tasks, reduced administration, and freed up time for complex and valuable legal work. Drawing from these quantitative and qualitative contributions, Aura represents a positive future step towards expanding access to legal services for people in the community while still being consistent with professional responsibilities, regulations, and standards of the UK's legal profession. The details of Aura can be found here