Performance Analysis of a Digital Legal-Literacy System in Ghana

Performance Analysis of a Digital Legal-Literacy System in Ghana | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Performance Analysis of a Digital Legal-Literacy System in Ghana David Oppong-Nkrumah, James Afful This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8066209/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract This paper examines the development and performance evaluation of a digital legal-literacy platform (Nimdie Legal) designed to enhance access to legal information in Ghana. The platform was developed to provide reliable, retrieval-grounded legal information on common justice needs such as family, tenancy, and criminal matters, while remaining compliant with the Legal Aid Commission Act, 2018 (Act 977) and related data-protection and cybersecurity legislation. Using data from system testing, we analyzed latency and performance across three configurations: LLM-only, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Retrieval-only modes. Results show that while the RAG configuration substantially improves grounding and factual reliability, it introduces significant latency cost, recording median (P50) response times around 15–16 seconds and 90th percentile (P90) times exceeding 20 seconds, compared to 3–4 seconds for LLM-only responses and under 2 seconds for retrieval-only queries. Latency increased proportionally with both session data usage and answer length, indicating a trade-off between verbosity and responsiveness. These findings highlight the operational constraints of retrieval-augmented systems in low-resource settings and provide an empirical foundation for optimizing digital legal-literacy platforms in Ghana and comparable jurisdictions. Full Text Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. Cite Share Download PDF Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. Our growing team is made up of researchers and industry professionals working together to solve the most critical problems facing scientific publishing. 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