Sheffield Digital Justice Projects
The following sections provide details on some of the Sheffield Digital Justice projects that ran during the academic years 2024/25 and 2025/26.
- Developing a Client Interviewing Tool
For this project, a group of students collaborated with students from the Norman Manley Law School in Jamaica to develop client interviewing tools. This article, written by some of the students on the project, explains more about what they did.
Sheffield Digital Justice: Developing a Client Interviewing Tool
A demo of each of the client interviewing tools can be found below.
Tool 1: Family lawyer (created by Kathleen Calamohoy)
This chatbot can be used to enhance client interviewing skills by enabling the user to experience an interview from the client’s perspective. The chatbot is acting as a lawyer based in the UK. The user acts as a client facing a divorce case and other family-related issues.
Tool 2: Employment law client (created by Ester Ferri)
This chatbot can be used to practice interviewing skills in an employment law scenario, where the client is emotionally distressed and requires guidance following an unexpected dismissal
Tool 3: (created by Olivia Hawkes)
This chatbot functions as an interactive legal training tool, helping simulate a client interview. It is designed to train interviewing skills by requiring the user to build rapport, ask non-leading question and extract relevant legal information from a confused client.
This chatbot allows you to test your client interviewing skills within a criminal law scenario. You will be interviewing a client who was accused of sexual assault after a party.
Tool 5: (created by Swikrit Bhandari)
This chatbot enables you to practice interviewing skills in a range of scenarios.
Tool 6: (created by Thanyha Kirisanker)
This chatbot can be used to practice interviewing skills with a client that mimics the psychological complexity of a domestic abuse survivor. The chatbot is programmed to be guarded, which forces the lawyer to earn trust through empathy rather than interrogation.
Tool 7: (created by Violet Keen)
This chatbot can be used to practice interviewing skills on a crime-based situation, practising an emotional setting where the client is stressed about the situation and requires help.
Tool 8: (created by Suhani Chatterjee)
This chatbot can be used to practice as an interviewer on a crime based scenario, the fact that the chatbot seems sad make the user be careful in terms of handling the feelings and emotional state of the client.
Tool 9: Zeus (created by Ali Al Shuwaili)
This chatbot is designed to assist potential and current international students at the University of Sheffield.
Tool 10 Jake Smith (Created by Paige Seymour)
This chatbot allows you to test your client interviewing skills. You will be acting as Jake's solicitor, and you need to get information with regard to a murder that has occurred. You need to decide if he is guilty or innocent. This is useful for those who have an interest in criminal law.
- Evaluating the affordances of publicly available chatbots
In this project, groups of students work with Sheffield Citizens Advice & Law Centre to evaluate the legal advice which publicly available chatbots can provide to laypeople. Some of the findings from the 2024/25 iteration are discussing in the video from the University of Sheffield’s ‘Beyond the Algorithm’ campaign.
- Finding AI Solutions for Law Firms
For this project, a group of students collaborated with the Sheffield-based tech company etiCloud. This article, written by the students on the project, explains more about what they did.
- Presenting at Sheffield & District Law Society
In December 2025 a group of Sheffield Digital Justice ran a workshop on behalf of the Sheffield & District Law Society’s Legaltech Committee. This focused upon the use of AI by solicitors.
- AI Policy Clinic
Students from law, criminology, computer science, politics and international relations worked together on a range of projects relating to AI policy, governance and safety, including responding to three public consultations.
You can find more details of this work on our dedicated AI Policy Clinic @ Sheffield substack.
- Sheffield Digital Justice x AI + Planetary Justice Alliance
For this project, our students worked with the AI + Planetary Justice Alliance to research the impacts of specific data centres and lithium mines based in the UK.
- Sheffield Digital Justice x Libra Law
- Sheffield Digital Justice students worked with Libra Law to evaluate their chatbot, looking at how legal professionals could use it to enhance their legal research.
- Digital Lawyering Podcast
Sheffield digital Justice students designed, recorded and edited three podcast episodes to accompany the release of the textbook Technology and Legal Practice: Becoming a Digital Lawyer (Routledge, 2026).