OpenHack: Building an AI Legal Assistant with Azure OpenAI & AI Search

Take on the role of an engineering team hired by Meridian & Associates LLP, a mid-size law firm with over 200 attorneys, to build "MeridianAI" an internal AI-powered legal research assistant using Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search. This OpenHack-style challenge course puts you in a realistic scenario where you must design, build, and harden a production-ready RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system.The firm's attorneys spend an average of 3 hours per day searching through case summaries, contract templates, regulatory guidance memos, and client engagement letters. Your mission is to build an AI assistant that answers attorney questions grounded exclusively in the firm's document library where hallucinations are unacceptable, every answer must be traceable to a source document, and the system must comply with strict data security policies for sensitive client information.This is not a tutorial. You will make real architectural decisions, provision Azure infrastructure, build a document ingestion and retrieval pipeline with Azure AI Search, integrate Azure OpenAI for intelligent responses, implement grounding and citation strategies to prevent hallucinations, and secure the system for production use. You'll debug real problems and deliver a working system that meets enterprise requirements.Designed for cloud engineers, AI engineers, and developers with basic Azure experience who want hands-on experience building RAG-based AI applications. This challenge-based format emphasizes problem-solving and engineering judgment over step-by-step instructions.