Expert system s have been applied in various do ma in s in o rd e r to solve pro blest hat requirernExpert knowledge e. Law is one such domain area that can receive a lot of help from ex pertrnsystems in the attempt to co me up with afire and efficient judicial system. Legal expert systemsrncontribute to this endeavor by embedding g expert knowledge with in the m in various forms andrnproviding expert advice .approaches abound in the design o f legal ex pert systems rang in g from rule based legal perpetraternsystems that represent the know ledge acquired from experts in the form o f IF-TH EN rules tornrn rnlegal expert systems employ in g neural networks. The approach adopted in this research in the design of a prototype legal expert systemrnHyRIlNLES (Hybrid Rule based Neural network Legal Ex pert System) is a combination of arnrule based approach and a neural network model in a n attempt to reap the best o f each . rnThe rule based module of the system works with rules that were derived from legal expertsrnregarding a specific domain of criminal law in order to arrive at a judgment. The neural networkrnpart of the prototype Hy Ru NLES system is needed to h an dl e a special type of open texturern(re la tin g to sentencing discretion) that the rule based part can't handle . The neural net-work partrnworks based on a modeled enveloped through training an ANN us in g past court cases.rnThe test result o f the performance of the system showed that the model of legal reasoning use d inrnthis research and adopted in the design of the prototype legal e x pert system is functional andrnCould be encouraging to implement in the form of a full y functional legal e x pert system.