Performance Analysis of a Digital Legal-Literacy System in Ghana

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.