Avocado Legal lets your AI assistant search South African legislation, judgments, court rules, and legal commentary — and show you the actual source passages behind each answer.
It is a private research tool for approved users. It does not replace your own legal judgment.
Living corpus
The library grows every day — and stays under quality control
Avocado’s corpus is not a fixed snapshot. Official sites publish new gazettes, judgments, and practice material continuously. Our pipeline discovers, fetches, parses, embeds, and re-checks that material on an ongoing basis. Coverage and retrieval quality improve over time; gaps and imperfect OCR are expected while the library matures.
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- Discover Scrapers watch court, government, and journal sources for new or changed documents.
- Fetch & store Files are downloaded, checksummed, and staged so we can skip unchanged content later.
- Parse & OCR PDFs and HTML become searchable text; image-heavy scans go through OCR where needed.
- Deduplicate & filter Content hashes, duplicate skips, and rights/quality rules keep noise and repeats out of search.
- Chunk & embed Text is split into passages and embedded into the private vector index used by search tools.
- Flag & repair Failed parses, missing files, and stale exports are queued for hydrate, retry, or operator review.
How you can help
- Ask your AI to escalate — if Avocado misses a source, returns a bad passage, or you disagree with an answer, tell the AI to call
submit_corpus_feedback(see the research guide). - Report gaps — Act, judgment, or practice directive missing or outdated: title, court/year, and a public URL if you have one.
- Flag bad passages — garbled OCR, wrong document, broken link, or obvious duplicate.
- Prefer official sources — judiciary.gov.za, concourt.org.za, and similar primary hosts beat third-party mirrors.
- Keep feedback anonymised — no client names or privileged facts; see security & data.
Before you connect
Read how we handle your data
Legal work is confidential. Before requesting access, please read the short security & data page: what Avocado receives when you search, where that traffic goes, what stays with your AI app, and what we do not store.
Step 1
Request access
Access is by invitation while we are in testing. Email us with:
- Your name
- The Google email address you will sign in with
- Which AI app you use (e.g. Claude Desktop)
We will confirm once your account is approved. Please wait before trying to connect.
Step 2
Connect in Claude Desktop
Most users connect through Claude Desktop (the desktop app from Anthropic).
- Open Settings → Connectors
- Choose Add connector or Add custom connector
- Name it Avocado Legal
- Paste this address when asked for a URL:
https://avocado-mcp.scholtz.dpdns.org/sse
- Click Connect and sign in with your approved Google account
- Start a new chat and make sure the Avocado Legal connector is enabled
Step 3
Try a real question
Once connected, ask a plain-language legal research question. Avocado searches the corpus and returns quoted source text with links.
You might ask
What must I show when bringing an urgent application in the motion court? Please search Avocado Legal and quote the source passages.
Avocado returns (excerpt from live search, 6 Jul 2026)
Motion Court: Practice Guidelines
“In cases of extreme urgency, the reasonable time afforded to the respondent to give notice of intention to oppose, is usually not less than 2 hours, excluding the hour between 13h00 and 14h00.”
“If the facts and circumstances set out in the applicant’s affidavits do not constitute sufficient urgency for the application to be brought as an urgent application … the court will decline to grant an order for the enrolment of the application as an urgent application … Save for a possible adverse cost order against the applicant the court will make no order on the application.”
Next
Get more from Avocado
The research guide explains how to phrase questions, which types of sources to search, and practical tips for litigation, drafting, and opinion work. The security & data page covers query flow, retention, and firm hygiene.
Help
Something not working?
- Sign-in rejected — your email may not be approved yet. Request access above.
- Connector not found — restart Claude Desktop after adding the connector.
- No useful results — try rephrasing; see the research guide for better question patterns.