Meet the 2025–26 A2AJ Student Innovation Fellows
# Meet the 2025–26 A2AJ Student Innovation Fellows
We are thrilled to introduce the recipients of this year's A2AJ Student Innovation Grants. Each project uses A2AJ's open legal datasets to build tools that advance access to justice in Canada.
Ali Ekber Cinar — Mapping Legal Citations to Reveal How Canadian Law Evolves
Ali is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law at McGill University. His research focuses on legal systems, data, and how technology can improve transparency in the development of law.
The Project
Ali's fellowship project develops an automated process to identify and analyze how Canadian court decisions cite one another. By tracing these citation relationships, the project builds a visual "network" that shows how legal ideas travel across cases and how courts engage with past decisions. Designed for researchers, students, public interest organizations, and anyone interested in how Canadian law works in practice, the tool helps make complex legal relationships easier to see and understand.
Court decisions do not stand alone — they rely on and shape one another over time. Yet these relationships are often difficult to track without specialized tools or deep technical knowledge. By making citation patterns visible and searchable, this project increases transparency in how legal authority develops and which decisions carry the most influence, supporting more informed legal research and lowering barriers to accessing legal knowledge.
Martin Rudolf — Testing Whether AI Legal Answers Are Actually Reliable in Canada
Martin is a second-year law student at the University of Alberta. Before law school, he completed a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering with a focus in Software Engineering. His research focuses on improving access to legal information and building practical software tools that support legal work.
The Project
Martin's fellowship project brings a Canadian-focused evaluation track to the open-source LegalBench project. He is developing a benchmark suite to test how well large language models handle Canadian legal materials, including case law and statutes. It focuses on two core skills that matter for public trust: whether an AI can summarize legal sources accurately and properly cite the sentences it relies on. The goal is to create clear, repeatable tests that help developers and the public assess the reliability of AI-generated legal information.
As the access to justice gap grows, more people are turning to tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini to understand legal issues — but it can be hard to know whether the AI answers are accurate or properly sourced. This project builds testing tools that encourage accurate summaries and traceable citations, making AI outputs easier to verify and safer to rely on, especially for everyday users.
Hassan Hamidi — Voice of the Courts: An Automated AI Legal Podcast and Digest
Hassan is a PhD student at York University and brings professional experience as a machine learning engineer to his research. His work focuses on fairness-aware machine learning and addressing bias in AI systems. He builds scalable technologies, including generative models, to promote more equitable outcomes in areas such as healthcare and public services.
The Project
Hassan's fellowship project is an automated AI platform that gathers new court decisions and legislation from open datasets and transforms them into plain-language summaries and short podcast episodes. The platform is designed for everyday Canadians and community organizations who need timely insights without the burden of interpreting complex rulings. By converting dense legal material into clear and accessible formats, the project makes it easier to stay informed about developments in the law.
Court and tribunal decisions are released every week, but they are often written in technical language that limits public understanding. This project helps bridge that gap by making legal information understandable as soon as it becomes available. By turning open legal data into accessible summaries and audio content, Voice of the Courts supports communities in understanding their rights, identifying trends, and engaging more confidently with the justice system.
Dania Ahmed and Hinna Ahmed — Making Environmental and Land Use Tribunal Decisions Easier to Find and Use
Hinna is a computer science undergraduate at Toronto Metropolitan University. Dania is a Juris Doctor candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Her work focuses on the intersections of social equity, environmental policy, and access to justice.
The Project
Dania and Hinna are expanding the A2AJ dataset by adding decisions from key Canadian environmental and land use tribunals. These decisions are scattered across government websites and difficult to search. The project collects, standardizes, and structures these rulings so they can be accessed through A2AJ's API and Hugging Face platform. It also introduces an environmental tagging system that organizes decisions by issue, tribunal, industry sector, Indigenous rights references, and outcomes — making the data more accessible and usable for researchers, advocates, and the public.
Important decisions affecting land, water, climate, and Indigenous rights are often made by tribunals rather than courts, yet they can be difficult to locate and analyze. By integrating these rulings into A2AJ's platform, the project makes environmental decision-making more transparent and searchable, strengthening environmental justice and improving access to legal information that has traditionally been fragmented and hard to use.
About the Program
The A2AJ Student Innovation Grants provide $10,000 per project, supported by the Law Foundation of Ontario. Fellows work with A2AJ's Canadian Legal data to build open-source tools that tackle access to justice challenges.
We'll be sharing updates on each fellow's progress throughout the year. To learn more about the grants program, visit our Projects page.