Here’s what the ABC are saying – we will be getting in touch asap to find out more about this lot….
Perth start-up develops ‘Bloomberg terminal’ for lawyers
Mon 12 Dec 2016, 11:19pm
A Perth start-up has developed technology it has likened to a “Bloomberg terminal” for lawyers.
Bloomberg terminals provide real-time market data used by stock brokers and other financial professionals.
Law and commerce graduate Conrad Karageorge said he and classmate Sam Spilsbury felt there was a need for a similar product for the legal world.
That was the catalyst for their start-up Jurimetrics.
“It came about arguably through a bit of a complaining session about law firms and technology, and you know how archaic they really are,” Mr Karageorge said.
“The big one for us was how lawyers understood the world around them.
“At the moment, it’s generally done by intuition rather than data.
“I kind of looked at the finance world and thought well everything’s done by data there, I mean they have these wonderful Bloomberg terminals which give you everything you need to know.
“Why not simply do a similar thing for law?
“And that’s what we did, we roped in Henry Hollingworth, one of our very talented relational database experts, and we went ahead and built a platform.”
Mr Karageorge said the technology was designed to be user-friendly.
“Basically what we do is we teach a computer to read court cases and government documents and then we extract really important commercial information from them and we display it as simple, easy to read charts and graphs,” he said.
“A good example is if you want to know BHP’s litigation history, you simply type into our platform BHP and all of their public interactions with government will be easily viewable.”
Smart technology already changing legal work
The Perth managing partner of top tier law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, Tony Joyner, said smart technology was already changing the way lawyers worked.
“We have a global system that uses some sort of smart technology in doing big discoveries, which is where law firms have to go through all the documents that might be relevant to a case,” he said.
“Funnily enough that’s resulted in us having to employ more lawyers, even though we can do it faster because there’s now just so much more information that in fact we couldn’t handle it before.”
The kind of research the Jurimetrics platform performed had in the past been done by paralegals and junior lawyers.
But Mr Joyner does not anticipate the technology will replace humans.
“This sort of technology is developing and it’s very interesting to us,” he said.
“It’s not so much a matter of replacing paralegals, I don’t think that’s quite how it works, it’s just another tool that helps us be smarter and ideally for a bit less money.”
Mr Joyner also acknowledged the technology comes with risks.
“You just have to be careful you don’t become over-reliant on it, you need to make sure that to the extent that human judgement is still appropriate you do apply it,” he said.
“You can’t let it become the ultimate arbiter, there needs to be someone standing behind it and making sure it’s still legal and ethical and right.”
Overall he said it was an insight into the possibilities of artificial intelligence.
“I don’t think it’s at the stage of being especially sophisticated artificial intelligence, and it’s not the sort of artificial intelligence you see in Star Trek, but it’s certainly on the journey and it’s materially more sophisticated than five, ten years ago, there’s no doubt about that.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-13/artificial-intrelligence-in-the-legal-sector/8116638
