When I returned to Ukraine in my role as Field Coordinator with Doctors of the World in 2025, I took the opportunity to deepen my understanding of the local legislative landscape. I gathered and curated legislation—sometimes translated from Ukrainian to English—and built an assistant I could actually hold a conversation with about legal questions on the ground.
I'm now sharing it publicly as a free legal advisor for humanitarian NGOs, designed to help both local and international organizations navigate Ukraine's legal framework. Country directors, operations managers, and technical coordinators will get the most out of it, and the knowledge base is especially rich in the health sector.
Try it here: baena.ai/demos/paralegal-advisor
Please note: This advisor is not a substitute for professional legal counsel. It offers preliminary guidance on everyday legal questions—helping you decide whether to seek a formal consultation, and how to frame it better when you do.
Why this tool matters
Legal consultation is a standard—and expected—indirect cost for NGOs operating in emergencies. Agencies must follow local law and uphold the rule of law as a matter of principle. This assistant helps you make those consultations count: run your questions through it first to orient yourself, understand the relevant legislation, and arrive at your lawyer's door already knowing what to ask. It's a friendly, non-judgmental first stop, working from an extensive and regularly updated base of Ukrainian legislation.
What it does well
The assistant answers plain-language questions—in English or Ukrainian—and, crucially, backs every answer with the specific laws it relied on, each cited by name and date so you can check it yourself. It draws on three layers of material, and it keeps them clearly separated:
- Primary legislation — the actual laws, Cabinet resolutions, and decrees. This is the authoritative text, and it always comes first.
- A curated humanitarian knowledge base — provisions hand-selected for the realities of NGO work: displacement, martial law, humanitarian imports, taxation, data protection.
- Expert analysis — commentary that interprets or compares the law. This is clearly labelled as analysis, with its date, so it's never mistaken for the law itself.
Why it's built this way
The interesting part of a tool like this isn't the technology—it's the discipline behind it. A few decisions matter more than the rest, and they're the same decisions I'd defend in any serious AI product:
Answers are grounded in real law General-purpose chatbots are fluent, confident, and perfectly capable of inventing a law that doesn't exist. For legal questions, that's not a quirk—it's a hazard. So this assistant is deliberately kept on a short leash: it can only answer from legislation it has actually retrieved, and when the source material doesn't cover your question, it says so instead of guessing.
Every claim is traceable. Trust in this domain comes from verifiability, not from a confident tone. That's why each answer points to the exact law behind it, with its title, date, and a link. If it tells you something, you can go and confirm it.
The law comes first, and commentary stays labelled. Mixing an expert's opinion into the statutory text would be misleading. Keeping the primary law, the curated set, and the analysis as distinct, clearly-marked layers means you always know whether you're reading the law or a reading of the law.
It's built for non-lawyers. The tone is calm and plain-spoken, it works in both English and Ukrainian, and it's honest about its limits—every consequential answer nudges you toward a qualified Ukrainian lawyer for the final word.
It stays in its lane. The assistant is a legal helper and nothing else. It won't be talked into wandering off-topic or into discussing how it was built—it just helps with Ukrainian law, reliably and privately.
None of this makes the tool flashier. It makes it trustworthy—which, for anything that touches compliance and the rule of law, is the only feature that counts.
An evolving legal framework
The core law governing humanitarian aid in Ukraine dates back to 1999 and has been amended and rephrased many times since February 2022 to reflect wartime conditions. Around it sits a broad body of law covering general economic activity—labour, auditing, imports—plus sector-specific rules, such as those for medical services. Many of these have been profoundly reshaped by martial law, which is exactly why a tool that stays current, cites its sources, and flags martial-law context is so useful.
Where it helps most
Based on what's actually keeping teams busy on the ground, these are the areas the assistant is most useful for:
- NGO registration and legal status — establishing and maintaining a compliant presence
- Mobilisation and staff reservation (bronoiuvannia) — protecting critical national staff
- Martial law — movement restrictions, access, and its effect on operations and contracts
- Customs and humanitarian imports — including the stricter rules around dual-use and medical goods
- Taxation and financial compliance — non-profit status, VAT exemptions on aid, currency controls
- Data protection — handling beneficiary data lawfully, including cross-border transfers
- Internally displaced persons — registration, certification, and access to state support
- Health operations — licensing, medicines, and integration with Ukraine's health systems
Why is this free?
We have no intention of charging anyone to use it. My work is with organizations, not individual users—I help them build AI products grounded in real operational experience rather than guesswork—so this advisor does two jobs at once.
It's a working demonstration of what a tailored, domain-specific AI tool can do when it's built carefully around a genuine problem, by someone who has lived that problem. And it's a gift to the humanitarian community in Ukraine—a small contribution to people who spend their days on far harder things than reading legislation.
If it saves a coordinator an hour, or helps a team walk into a legal consultation better prepared, it has done its job.
This advisor exists to make a complex legal environment a little easier to navigate—ultimately saving time and resources for the organizations doing the work.
Want this for your own documents? Think of it as a conversation with your knowledge base—not a replacement for a lawyer. If your organization would benefit from a private, tailored assistant built around its own documents and workflows, get in touch.
