Global Public Sector

Widelabs AI Makes Legal Services More Accessible for Millions in Brazil

Objective

WideLabs’ AI solutions are helping to modernize and expand access to legal services for the Public Ministry of Rio Grande do Sul (MPRS) in Brazil. The system addresses both how internal investigations are handled and how the public can access justice records. The goal is to make public administration more efficient, as required by Brazil’s constitution, and to support the United Nations’ goal of promoting fair and inclusive societies.

By using advanced natural language processing and database curation and integration, the solutions speed up investigations and make justice records easier to find and use. The system increases efficiency, transparency, and scalability, benefiting more than 8 million citizens in 497 municipalities throughout Rio Grande do Sul.

Customer

Public Ministry of Rio Grande de Sul (MPRS), Brazil

Partner

WideLabs

Use Case

Conversational AI
Generative AI / LLMs
RAG

Products

NVIDIA NIM
NeMo Retriever
NeMo Curator
NVIDIA AI Enterprise

Rising Legal Service Caseloads Addressed With AI

Brazil has a massive backlog of legal cases, with over 82 million pending in the courts as of late 2023. In Rio Grande do Sul alone, about 60,000 police inquiries are archived each year. The MPRS processes around 39,000 public service requests annually, and this number continues to rise.

This overwhelming volume of cases slows down the justice system, delaying outcomes for millions of people. As a result, there’s a growing need for new, technology-based solutions to ensure efficient delivery of public service while increasing quality.

WideLabs

Justice Intelligence Agents: Transforming Legal Analysis and Investigation

The Justice Intelligence platform developed by WideLabs for MPRS consists of two sophisticated AI agents designed to revolutionize how prosecutors, attorneys, analysts, and assistants at MPRS handle cases and investigations.

WideLabs

The Justice Intelligence platform has been tested with a small sample of prosecutors and went into full production in January 2025.

The Justice Intelligence platform includes two primary AI agents:

TORI Investigation Assistant: A powerful investigative tool that interfaces with the TORI database, featuring:

  • Natural language query capability for complex database searches, achieved using advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines built with NVIDIA NeMo™ Retriever for embedding, reranking, and hybrid search, and deployed efficiently as NVIDIA NIM™ microservices.
  • Conversation history tracking enhanced by aligned models that maintain context effectively.
  • NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails work to ensure consistent information retrieval and behavior, contributing to deterministic outcomes for semantically equivalent queries.
  • Ability to analyze complex legal documents and identify relevant information or connections via natural language interactions.
  • Integration with existing legal databases.
  • Comprehensive search capability to ensure exhaustive searches for every query.

Archiving Intelligence Assistant (AIA): A tool that specializes in police inquiry archiving analysis, employing advanced natural language processing to:

  • Analyze judicial process archiving promotions.
  • Generate clear, accessible explanations of archiving decisions, ensuring transparency in legal decision-making.
  • Provide an interactive Q&A interface for understanding the details of the processes.
  • Create contextually relevant follow-up questions based on user responses.
  • Interactions managed for safety and compliance using NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails.

VERA: A Justice Assistant Democratizing Legal Access Through Technology

In addition to the agents above, WideLabs designed the Citizen Access Agent for MPRS, a comprehensive public interface specifically tailored to serve Brazil’s diverse population, with special attention to victims, low-income citizens, and those with limited formal education.

Here are the core features and capabilities of the Citizen Access Agent:

  • Secure authentication and access.
  • Intelligent case routing governed by NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails that analyzes user descriptions to determine the case type, identify the appropriate institution, and provide guidance.
  • Document management system.
  • Appointment scheduling system.

The combination of advanced natural language processing, sophisticated RAG pipelines built with NeMo Retriever, and robust safety layers from NeMo Guardrails makes the Justice Intelligence platform a powerful tool in modernizing Brazil’s legal system, directly supporting the constitutional right of citizens to efficient administration.

“The solution will also elevate the State Protection System to a new level,” said João Cláudio Pizzato Sidou, deputy attorney general at MPRS. “The government’s role in protecting and safeguarding citizens’ rights and interests will be able to reach children, people with low formal education, and victims.”

The impact of these agents has been transformative: “The system can find inconsistencies in huge databases in a matter of minutes,” Sidou said. “Procedures and investigations that could last months or years can be resolved or advanced in less than a day.” The benefits these AI solutions deliver for public administration are multifold, including enhancing the fight against corruption, increasing administrative efficiency, and reducing costs.

“The fight against corruption becomes more immediate and effective, with analysis happening closer to the actual events, increasing our chances of containing and repairing any effects,” said Sidou.

The previous system processed approximately 60,000 police inquiries annually in Rio Grande do Sul. The new Justice Intelligence platform represents a significant advancement in how legal institutions process and analyze information, leading to faster, more accurate decision-making while maintaining legal rigor.

“These are virtuous circles that we are initiating,” Sidou emphasizes, highlighting how the platform’s capabilities extend beyond mere process automation to fundamentally transform how the justice system operates. The platform’s success has garnered national attention, with recent presentations to the National Council of the Public Ministry (CNMP) demonstrating its potential as a model for other states.

Technical Challenges

To build the Justice Intelligence platform, the WideLabs team had to overcome a variety of technical and administrative challenges:

Consistent Adherence to Principles of Sovereign AI

Foremost was making sure that the platform adhered to sovereign AI principles, where the data and models maintained local control rather than relying on external providers. NVIDIA AI Enterprise, with its comprehensive NeMo platform, provided the tools to build and manage these solutions.

Large Document Volume

  • Managing and processing an initial database of tens of thousands documents—a volume that has been continuously growing as older data is integrated and new entries are added—required a robust approach. A scalable, GPU-accelerated pipeline for document preprocessing was developed with NVIDIA NeMo Curator, significantly improving data quality and handling for subsequent retrieval steps. 
  • The system must ensure all relevant documents are retrieved with no omissions. This exhaustive requirement was non-trivial to solve and remains a challenge as new and more diverse databases are integrated; however, the high-quality data foundation prepared using NeMo Curator is a key step ensuring the reliability of the system.
  • Difficulty in validating responses due to volume and diverse document content.

Accuracy and Reliability

  • Critical need for high precision and minimal hallucination due to the sensitive legal nature.
  • Complex technical content, including digitized or scanned audit reports and legal documentation.
  • The platform has no precedent, with specific and varied requirements and no existing market solutions to reference or build upon. Standard RAG approaches couldn’t directly tackle these requirements, prompting the research team to develop and implement enhanced strategies. This included leveraging the NVIDIA NeMo platform to customize models for the MPRS legal domain with NVIDIA NeMo Customizer, and using NVIDIA NeMo Retriever to build sophisticated RAG pipelines that incorporate new methods of hybrid search, high-quality embedding generation, effective reranking, and advanced document chunking.

Domain Expertise

  • A core challenge was the need to understand both technical auditing and legal domains, and processing specialized terminology and concepts. The alignment capabilities available through NVIDIA NeMo Aligner helped imbue the AI agents with a deeper understanding of the specific language.

User Education and Adoption

  • Creating tools to guide users in meeting system requirements.
  • Overcoming resistance in a traditional, rigid sector with many legacy systems, which was possible by the improved reliability and intuitive guided interactions.

Conversational Intelligence

  • Maintaining contextual dialogue with memory of previous interactions while preserving all the other capabilities.
  • Conversational logic and safety protocols, which were enforced with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails, ensuring consistent and accurate responses across conversation history.

Impact and Results

The Justice Intelligence platform represents a significant advancement in making justice accessible to all citizens, regardless of their socioeconomic status or technical literacy. It transforms traditional bureaucratic processes into streamlined, user-friendly interactions while maintaining the necessary legal rigor and security. The system’s integration with widely used platforms like WhatsApp and its ability to provide comprehensive guidance makes it particularly effective in reaching traditionally underserved populations.

The increasing usage trends demonstrate the portal’s success in breaking down traditional barriers to justice access, creating virtuous circles that benefit the entire population. This modern approach to public service delivery sets a new standard for how justice institutions can effectively serve their communities while fulfilling their constitutional obligations.

The implementation of MPRS’s AI solutions has delivered substantial benefits across multiple dimensions, including operational excellence in enhancing service for the province’s 8 million citizens. 

The platform has also seen significant social impact, particularly effective in democratizing access to justice for traditionally underserved populations such as senior citizens, children requiring special protection, crime victims, minority groups, and low-income individuals.

Overall, the platform has started to transform the entire legal process in MPRS, including integrating modern technology into traditional legal procedures, creating more transparent decision-making processes, and developing a secure and user-friendly authentication process.

Looking Forward: Shaping the Future of Justice

The successful implementation of the Justice Intelligence platform and Citizen Access Portal at MPRS marks a pivotal moment in streamlining legal data and making it accessible. With usage trending upward, the model shows strong potential for national expansion.

As more public institutions seek to modernize their services, the MPRS implementation offers a proven model balancing technological sophistication with accessibility. It shows how modern technology can fulfill both operational and social responsibilities.

Furthermore, considering that other countries face similar challenges and demands, these solutions hold significant potential for expansion across Latin America. This would not only promote efficiency and transparency in the legal systems of these countries but also facilitate collaboration and the sharing of best practices among them. Thus, the experience of MPRS can serve as an inspiration and a starting point for digital transformation throughout the region.

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