Own product · 2026
KnowMyRights.ca
A network of free, plain-language Canadian legal information websites: one hub and seven audience sites for tenants, workers, newcomers, students, consumers, housing and privacy. I founded it, designed it and run it as product owner, engineer and designer.
What it is and who it serves
Free legal information, not legal advice, in the spirit of Steps to Justice and CLEO, sourced only from official sources (Canada.ca, Ontario.ca, Justice Laws, CanLII). Run by a federal corporation; the founder is not a lawyer, and the product is built so it never acts like one.
Audiences: Ontario tenants searching after hours; international students; newcomers and refugee claimants; non-union and precarious workers; consumers with refund and warranty problems. Canada-wide, Ontario first.
Innovative ideas
- A legal-information chat grounded in hand-verified facts. Critical dates and numbers come from a verified-facts table at run time, so the chat cannot guess pinpoint law.
- A lint gate for the law. A pull request fails on imperative "you must" language (unauthorised practice of law), fake testimonials, stub pages, hard-coded colours, broken links or search-index drift.
- Legal-drift monitoring. A weekly audit checks every cited statute and government URL and diffs amended-on dates; a monthly audit covers federal and Ontario facts.
- Situation-first triage. Describe your problem in your own words and get routed to the right site; tenant notice-form chips (N4, N5, N12 and more) deep-link to the answer.
- One generator, one library. A satellite generator and a shared component library mean every new site inherits disclaimers, citations, schema and accessibility pages automatically.
- Honest corrections. A same-day fix replaced prototype placeholders with illustrative ranges; "Verified Review" was renamed "Published after moderation".
- Built for AI search. An llms.txt describing the network, crawlable FAQ answers and structured data so answer engines can cite it.
Features
Legal-information chat
Streaming answers across topics, bilingual, refuses drafting or case-specific advice, ends every substantive answer with a disclaimer. Tiered routing: cached FAQ, then a fast model, then a stronger one. QA: grade B+, 0 of 4 guardrail breaches.
Verified facts
24 pinpoint-verified facts over 5 topics in a database table and a tracker of 30+ facts with sources, severity and review dates.
Source citations
Inline citations with source, direct URL, statute reference and last-verified date; a 25-source library; statute links; cite-this-page.
Trust programme
Eight trust deliverables done 17 Apr 2026: founder byline, about pages, Person and Organization schema, editorial methodology, sources page, accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA, AODA) and contact pages, province-aware disclaimers.
Structured data
Article, breadcrumb, FAQ and item-list schema; a fix cleared 38 invalid structured-data flags.
Site search
Cmd+K search with the index rebuilt on every commit and a drift check, so no page is forgotten.
Tenant notice triage
A homepage with 9 notice-form chips and a three-column detail panel with statute citations and action steps.
Rights tools
Rights cards, scenarios, laws library, FAQ, provincial guides, a severance calculator, a student DLI finder, cases pages.
Security
Row-level security on every table, per-IP rate limits, error tracking; review findings scheduled into a P0/P1/P2 roadmap.
Audit practice
A full platform review (about 95 pages crawled plus a code sweep) and a five-layer quality programme per site: links, design, legal wording, facts, SEO.
Design
- Hub redesign: a task-first hero with a free-text situation box, quick chips, a trust row and three urgency lanes (happening now, planning ahead, learning), replacing a generic grid.
- A serif display face for headlines and a clean sans for body; each satellite keeps its own palette inside one design system.
- Design rules I set for the parity work: colour lock, content lock, legal-wording rule, shared components only, one site per pull request, desktop and mobile screenshots before merge.
Stack
Numbers
| Pages | 354 across 7 sites (17 Apr 2026); 394 sitemap URLs across 8 (17 Jun) |
| Shared components | 12, then 19, then 22 (7 to 18 Apr) |
| Tests | 120+ end-to-end cases (20+ per site) |
| SEO | 152 of 156 audit issues addressed; canonical tags on about 340 pages |
| Audits | 87 findings triaged (2 critical, 18 high, 38 medium, 29 low) |
| Traffic | about 1,766 visitors in 30 days (June 2026 snapshot) |
Timeline
| Mar 2026 | First database project; monorepo of hub and satellites |
| 6 to 7 Apr | Chat QA audit and hardening |
| 17 to 21 Apr | Trust programme done; hub redesign; SEO batch and redirects on 8 domains |
| 20 Apr to 11 May | Weekly legal reference audits |
| 10 May | Tenant homepage redesign and same-day legal-wording fix |
| 6 Jun | Full platform review |
| Jun | Pillar article and content cluster plan; deep SEO audit |
| 31 Aug to 1 Sep | Design-parity programme; privacy site audit |