Canadian Lawyer recently spoke with founder and CEO of LexCheck Gary Sangha. The conversation covered the “hype” of generative AI, its potential, its risks, and the future of a technologically augmented legal industry. *The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you tell me about your professional background?
I’m a serial legal tech entrepreneur. I’m a former corporate lawyer who just saw a lot of inefficiencies in legal that I thought tech can potentially solve. My first startup Intelligize is the market leader for SEC filings research. It was acquired by LexisNexis in 2016. I was a law professor along the way. And then I started LexCheck to help in-house counsel to do their work more efficiently.
I’m biased. But my view of legal is that we are front office. We’re the deal closers. How do I unlock my people? How do I unlock legal to help close deals out? That’s kind of been the driving mission for LexCheck.
When did you begin working with AI in the legal sphere?
We’ve been working with AI for years. We started working on AI around 2019 on our own proprietary tech, which was rules based, and natural-language-processing based. In terms of generative AI, we started working on that this year, just like most folks.
The hype is crazy, right? I am a fan. I’m very excited. But the hype is crazy. What we want to do is just kind of see where the dust settles, see where the advantages are, see where the generative AI stuff is lacking, and then focus our energies where it makes the most sense. It’s a process.
My sense is this is really cool stuff. It can do a lot of neat things. But it’s an ingredient to do dedicated things.
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