# What Happens When You Try to Build a Lawyer for Someone Who Can't Afford One?

The Problem That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone Pakistan has 220 million people. A functioning legal system. Hundreds of Acts, ordinances, and constitutional provisions that technically protect every citizen. Almost nobody can use them. The median lawyer's consultation fee in Karachi is more than what many families earn in a week. Legal aid is understaffed and geographically concentrated in major cities. And the laws themselves? Written in English — a language most of the population reads functionally at best, and doesn't speak at home at all. So when a landlord illegally locks someone out. When a factory worker gets fired without severance. When a woman wants to know her inheritance rights. When a tenant needs to understand what "Section 16 of the Rent Restriction Ordinance" actually means for their specific situation — they either find a lawyer they can't afford, ask someone who doesn't really know, or quietly give up. This isn't a knowledge problem. It's an access problem. I'm a CS student at Sukkur IBA University in interior Sindh — not Karachi, not Islamabad. The kind of city where you feel the gap between what the law says and what people actually know it says every single day. That gap is where HAQ started. HAQ is an Arabic and Urdu word. It means right — as in, what is rightfully yours. The name felt important. The Core Idea: Ask the Law, Get the Law There's a specific failure mode with AI and legal questions that drove every design decision I made, and it's worth naming clearly. Standard LLMs — any of them — will answer legal questions confidently. They'll cite "Section 144" or "the Transfer of Property Act" with total authority. They are often wrong. Sometimes subtly: the section exists but doesn't say what the model claims. Sometimes obviously: the Act doesn't apply in that province. Always uncitable: the user has no way to verify without finding the source themselves. For an accessibility tool, a confidently wrong answer isn't neutral. It's actively dangerous.