Overview

Justis Connection is a legal directory platform connecting people with attorneys. The Legal Layer is their members-only AI tool built on top of it: paste or upload a contract, say whether you're the one who drafted it or the one being asked to sign it, and get back a plain-English breakdown of your obligations, your risks, and the questions you should be asking before you sign anything. It's live at justisconnection.com/legal-layer.

My Role: Backend Engineer

I owned the AI pipeline behind the tool: the model integration, prompt engineering, and the request-handling layer members actually hit when they submit a contract. That meant prompt optimization to keep the six-section analysis (summary, obligations both ways, risk flags, questions to ask) consistent and well-formatted, along with prompt caching and rate limiting on the request path to keep the tool fast and cost-controlled as usage grows.

How It Works

A member picks their role in the contract (drafted it or received it), pastes in the text or uploads the file, and the tool sends it through to the AI with a role-aware prompt so the analysis reads differently depending on which side of the agreement they're on.

What's Next

Working with the client, we've scoped a full control panel as the next milestone: usage observability, automatic alerts on spend or error thresholds, and per-member usage tracking, all built natively on the same infrastructure rather than bolting on a third-party analytics service.

Outcome

The Legal Layer is live and in production use on the Justis Connection platform today, with the observability milestone next on the roadmap.