Amicus
On demand legal services.
Overview
South Africa's laws are public but unsearchable: the gazettes that govern the country sit on a government server as photocopies. I co-founded Amicus to fix that, designing the brand and both products on top of an OCR pipeline built to turn those scans into a searchable database, one for the public and one for lawyers.
Brand
I named it Amicus, from amicus curiae, the friend of the court. Not a party to the case, just there to help it reach a better answer. That covered both products in one word.
The rest was built for belief rather than personality. We were asking the public to take legal advice from a chatbot, and lawyers to build real cases on it. The soft blue borrowed enough of the legal world's institutional tone to feel legitimate, without the coldness that stops people asking for help.
Typography came from the people who read law all day. Courts specify typefaces because briefs are read slowly and have to be remembered, so I interviewed lawyers and law students at UCT and let their answers choose the face.
Accessibility was a requirement, not a final check. A product built to open up the law can't only work for people who already find things easy.
Legislation Research Assistant
Built for lawyers spending hours hunting through legislation that was never designed to be searched, so we gave them the searchable database and the tools to work in it: deep research, findings saved into a case folder as they go, and that folder shareable with a client or the justice system.
A lawyer building a case wants the source in front of them and a record of where it came from, so the design gets out of the way and keeps the trail intact.
Smart Public
Legal help for people who can't afford a lawyer.
You ask a question in plain language and have a proper consultation about your problem, not a search result. It ends with a legal opinion and, where you need one, a document generated in the chat and ready to use. If you want certainty, a real lawyer verifies the advice and the document for a fee.
That last step mattered more than any other. It set the price of certainty at something a person could actually pay, and it kept a human in the loop at the point where the stakes are highest.
What I learned
Trust is designed, not declared. People will only take legal advice from software if every detail earns it, from the colour palette to the way a source is cited.
The most important feature turned out to be the handoff to a real lawyer. Knowing where the product should stop mattered as much as everything it could do.
