Last month, College of Engineering graduate student Victor Diaz was announced as the winner of Temple’s eighth annual Changemaker Challenge for his entrepreneurship idea, LegalAI.
Still in the early stages of planning and implementation, LegalAI is a chatbot that would assist users with the legal aspects of the immigration system.
With no fully built startup required, Diaz entered the competition with an idea he created for his Design Thinking course from the Engineering Management master’s program. The original idea was to build an AI chatbot to assist with the mental health of immigrants. However, based on workshop feedback and personal experience, he thought that legal assistance would be more beneficial.
Diaz first thought of the switch after using ChatGPT to help a family member through a legal process.
“I was talking to my aunt, and she was going through a legal process, and she had questions about this process, but it’s very expensive to go through a lawyer,” he explains.
Diaz used ChatGPT to help answer her question, saving her the cost of a lawyer and providing some clarity on next steps for her situation.
Judges from the competition provided Diaz with helpful feedback and suggestions to differentiate his product from ChatGPT and make it more specific to the target audience. He also credits his Design Thinking course with giving him the tools to improve LegalAI
Diaz shares what he learned from Design Thinking stating, “When you are developing a new product or service, always think about the people you are going to help...because if you are doing something to help people, everything is going to be easier for you and your product or service is going to be more successful.”
He is still deciding on what to do with the prize money but plans to continue his work on LegalAI.
“I have the chance to help people. I know that a lot of immigrants, they don’t know about this process...I think this is a good way to help them to know more about their rights or about this legal process,” Diaz concludes.