Law applies to us all, in one form or another. It is what has established the societal guidance and fair coordination from historical to modern times. It has metamorphosed with the changing times and people. Law has adopted various forms, all to keep everyone in check. But, increasingly it has become a challenge to access the very law that is meant to be accessible to all.
Currently, access to the law is almost becoming an illusion. The legal and liberal standards that uphold societies today are slowly getting costlier. Legal services are charging more and more for their services. In effect, you and I might not have the same confidence in hiring a lawyer anytime a dispute arises, as we would, at the same time last year. Ignorantia juris non excusat! That is the expression that best sums up this situation. It simply means: “No one is supposed to ignore the law, but no one can access it at the same time!”
Looking around the market, the big giants in legal tech are the likes of LexisNexis and Westlaw. These online legal services have been characterized by a model similar to that of ‘cheap mass production’, only that they aren’t so cheap. Search results have less-than-average insights and exploitable information. The slowness and lack of accuracy during case research has also affected users in many cases. In addition, you might have to pay out extra charges to learn on using these complex systems. Extra charges enabling access to sub-tools within these systems is also not uncommon.
In order to justify their costs, for instance, Lexis Nexis argue that they provide value in terms of data coverage and claim that their heading information is written manually. This is more or less similar to the other big players in the market. Firstly, data coverage is insensible without accurate retrieval of information. Though their database may contain more than 10 million opinions, the search engine is not capable of retrieving it smartly, organizing them and obtain the context in individual documents.
The technology used by these giants is not up to date or supported with the necessary capabilities to make more use of data. In many cases, for instance, the search engines of these giants would require manual input of synonyms (e.g. admissible and acceptable). However, it’s still a huge problem to provide all the synonyms of English and the synonyms, antonyms or other relations are context dependent. This means that the data might be lying somewhere in the database, but it might not be findable because of the search engine’s finesse.
Secondly, manual addition of headings and annotations, by legal experts, is labor intensive. The result is an increased cost of these tools. However, this school of thought doesn’t add up since you wouldn’t expect big firms like these to rely on such slow methods of operation. We at Juritool, provide the heading information automatically and with more accuracy and consistency by the employment of artificial intelligence technology.
So who is Juritool anyway?
Juritool is a team of entrepreneurs, lawyers, engineers and mathematicians working together to make the law accessible and transparent. We believe that law should not have price as a defining point for its accessibility. Through our services, lawyers, as well as their clients, can access the law in a simplified manner. Not only does this translate to sound economics, exploitable knowledge is also brought closer, faster and more efficiently.
Launched less than a month ago, we are a growing legal research and analysis company with over 30,000 searches per day! Unlike the other players in the market, our products are powered by artificial intelligence and smart analytics. This can be seen for instance, in calculating the distance between two words like "admissible" and "acceptable" per context. That is why queries with the word ‘acceptable’ might feature relevant results with the word ‘admissible’ instead. Additionally, we have millions of decisions which can be navigated through visual methods (graphs, mind maps etc.) in order to find the good law and measure legal risk, a feature which can’t be done by other tools.
We stimulate innovation across different disciplines in order to create the best legal research and analysis in the world. We aim to create a personal relation with our clients. We don’t want you to look at our products as mere programs, but as smarter assistants who you can trust to empower you. Juritool is a smart product for smart lawyers.