Quick Start: Currently no frontend. Follow the steps below to locally run the program, and ask questions via the FASTapi UI.

Clone & enter the repo: git clone https://github.com/<your‑github‑user>/LawyerBot.git cd LawyerBot

Create a virtual environment & install deps python -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate # Windows ⇒ .venv\Scripts\activate pip install --upgrade pip pip install -r requirements.txt

Add environment variables Create a .env file at the project root: OpenAI OPENAI_API_KEY=

Pinecone PINECONE_API_KEY= PINECONE_INDEX=lawyerbot-index

Path to your combined legal JSON knowledge base COMBINED_DATA_PATH=/absolute/path/to/legal_data.json

Launch the API server uvicorn app.main:app --reload

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs to explore and test the POST /ask endpoint.

Acknowledgements FastAPI OpenAI Python SDK Pinecone SentenceTransformers