GenAI is being used to increase efficiency in the legal process, says Annie Lespérance, Head of Americas at Jus Mundi, a global legal intelligence company.

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Generative AI is expected to disrupt just about every business sector, according to one report from Gartner, from energy to manufacturing to pharmaceuticals and more.

The legal world is no exception. MES Computing recently spoke with Annie Lespérance, Head of Americas at Jus Mundi, a global legal intelligence company.

Paris-based Jus Mundi provides an AI-powered search platform for legal professionals to search through court documents and legal publications for international laws and arbitration.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study that Jus Mundi shared, GenAI potentially can lead to a 15 percent to 25 percent productivity savings for the typical law firm.

Lespérance, who is not only well-versed in AI but also a lawyer, spoke about Jus Mundi’s goals and vision and how AI is being used to make the legal process more efficient.

Can you provide an overview of Jus Mundi?

We are a legal tech company that provides powered global legal intelligence. When the company was founded back in 2019 there wasn’t a centralized database of primary sources and international law and arbitration on the market so that when a user wanted to access that information, [they] would have to go through many databases, which was definitely not practical or useful

Access to information in law is absolutely key ... to find that critical piece of information could be very useful for your case. This is where Jus Mundi came in. We collect unique and exclusive data thanks to our more than 70 partnerships with arbitration institutions and associations worldwide. With that we have become the most comprehensive database in international law and arbitration on the market. We are a niche product. We are that specific vertical which is international and arbitration within the legal space. We have now more than 150,000 users from law firms, multinational corporations, governmental bodies and academic institutions in more than a hundred countries.

We believe that our GenAI tool, which is called Jus AI Assistant—currently that tool is in beta of phase—we haven't launched it commercially yet, but we believe that that tool will be very much well received and already our beta testers are reporting a huge efficiency gain by using that tool.

Can you speak in general about the type of international law and arbitration Jus AI Assistant is used for?

International law means any kind of cross-border dispute that is handled by an international tribunal so it could be the international court of justice that’s based in The Hague or it could be arbitration—anything that crosses borders—mainly commercial disputes, could be investment disputes. So that’s when a company invests in a foreign country and then the company gets expropriated, they want to get damages.

How does the Jus AI Assistant work?

At the moment if the lawyer wants to carry out legal research, let’s say on our platform but really on any other providers’ platform ... you have to type in your search words and then there are Boolean types of searches that you can use to kind of narrow down your search, you have filters to narrow down your search, and then you have various hits and then you have to click on each and every hit to see whether it makes sense with whatever information you’re looking for.

GenAI is going to completely change the way a lawyer will carry out legal research because now rather than typing up search words and using the filters and checking every hit ... you’re actually going to ask a question to a chatbot.

The algorithm is only being fed our database of information. It’s an isolated world of data. And then you get an answer that is kind of written by this algorithm that provides you almost in a legal memo form exactly what you’re looking for with footnotes referencing all the decisions that are mentioned in the answer.

There are many ... documents provided in another language than the language in which the proceedings are taking place.

Those have to be translated and that can be very costly ... you can upload those documents to the tool and then the tool will analyze, within probably seconds, or a few minutes much more quickly than a human lawyer would be able to.

Are the courts OK with the use of AI in proceedings?

The arbitrator deciding the case is going to rely on a GenAI tool [but] there shouldn’t be any delegation of decision-making power to the tool. It should just be research; you cannot decide a case.

As a provider we’re very conscious of the way we mitigate against hallucinations because we’ve heard stories of lawyers drafting pleadings when they were lazy.

When the platform is in final release, what is the pricing model for the service?

At the moment, the way we price is by law firm. We don’t do individual licenses. It’s a law firm subscription. We price by the size of the arbitration team internally.