Overview
Directus-backed bilingual knowledge base exposing 2,400 UAE commercial law documents, ADGM precedents, and internal matter templates — with AI search, citations, and role-scoped access — cutting junior lawyer research time from 3 hours to 22 minutes.
The challenge
Junior associates spent 3+ hours per research task hunting through Westlaw, a shared network drive with 2,400 unsearchable PDFs, and emailing senior partners for precedents. Supervisor interruption was constant — partners estimated 40% of their day was answering research questions that should have been self-served. A PII-safe, on-premise solution was a hard requirement given client-confidentiality obligations.
The solution
We deployed Directus as the document CMS and content API on the firm's on-premise VMware infrastructure, loading 2,400 documents with bilingual metadata. We extended Directus with a custom pgvector indexing extension that embeds chunks of each document into PostgreSQL and serves a semantic-search API consumed by a Next.js knowledge portal. Gemini was used solely for re-ranking search results and generating citation excerpts — with a firewall rule ensuring no document content left the on-premise network.
Outcomes
Junior lawyer research time from 3 hours to 22 minutes average
Partner supervision interruptions related to research down 58%
100% of documents PII-safe and on-premise — passed the firm's information-security audit
2,400 documents now searchable in Arabic and English with AI-generated citation excerpts
Key metrics
Tech stack
Services
Client testimonial
“My senior partners were spending almost half their day answering questions that are now answered by the portal in seconds. It has genuinely changed what it means to be a junior here.”
— Managing Partner, Sulwan Legal · Abu Dhabi
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