Researchers Karthika Solai, Jonathan Brandin, Alden Swain, and Zachary Lisman undertook a capstone project that provides aid with starting a business.

Starting a new business in the United States can be tricky. There is lots of complicated legal jargon that makes it hard to navigate. People want to have step-by-step instructions on how the process works. Business development agencies and firms want to be able to track how new businesses are proceeding through certain milestones.

The goal of the Lexipedia project is to create an open-source wiki with business process models that make complex legal processes more understandable. The models generated should be legally and ethically viable so they can be upheld in a court of law, meaning errors should be limited.

Existing literature shows how different process mapping techniques have been used to transform legal code into more digestible processes. Older research uses mapping techniques such as Petri Nets and POWL models. Newer techniques involve the use of creating knowledge graphs to implement RAG systems.

During this phase of the project, the researchers focused on creating a scalable process that requires minimal human intervention to transform law code from any region in the United States into process models. To keep the scope tight, they chose to focus on local law code for places such as
Charlottesville and Virginia. Through the use of LLM resources, Streamlit, and Neo4j, they focused on creating a back-end database of knowledge from law code that can then be queried to get reasonable and specific answers about business-related laws.

In their study, the researchers found ways to help take the complex process of starting a business and help simplify the legal procedures. They did this by creating process models and knowledge graphs, and through integration with Large Language Models , created a database that encompasses all the connections in the codes for the State of Virginia.

This is the start of a process that will have future iterations and eventually evolve into a one-stop shop wiki that will have everything that is needed to be a legally compliant LLC in whatever state you plan on operating in.

Researchers: Jonathan Brandin, Zachary Lisman, Karthika Solai, Alden Swain

Sponsors: Anson Parker

Advisors: Bill Basener

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