The ABA Jnl reports..
Labor and employment law firm Fisher Phillips has partnered with Blue J Legal Inc. to bring the Toronto legal tech company’s AI-powered technology, which predicts court outcomes in the employment law arena, to the United States.
The partnership, which was announced last month, will initially give Fisher Phillips exclusive access to the U.S. employment tool that Blue J Legal develops in tandem with the law firm.
Blue J Legal’s Canadian employment law product, which was released in late 2017, reviews the facts of a case and relevant precedents in the selected jurisdiction to predict litigation results with 90% accuracy, according to the company.
The tool, known as Blue J L&E, can also predict the length of time that a court would determine is reasonable notice to provide an employee who is being dismissed and calculate the amount that an employee would likely be owed upon termination.
Evan Shenkman, senior director of knowledge management at Fisher Phillips, which has more than 30 offices across the country and about 400 lawyers, says the firm will ultimately use Blue J Legal’s predictive information for U.S. matters to inform litigation strategy and assist with guidance provided to clients.
Evan Shenkman, senior director of knowledge management at Fisher Phillips.
“It is a great way to help our attorneys make more efficient and more accurate predictions when they are giving counseling advice,” Shenkman says. “If we are providing guidance to a client on how to craft a restrictive covenant or a noncompete, we could plug the terms into this tool and then see whether or not it is likely to be enforceable.”
Benjamin Alarie, CEO and co-founder at Blue J Legal, a machine learning and artificial intelligence software company based in Toronto, says the company decided to team up with Fisher Phillips because the firm backs its vision of bringing greater clarity to the law through the use of cutting-edge technology.
“What I find really exciting is the ability for us to work closely with members of the Fisher Phillips team who have deep expertise in the labor and employment issues that we are going to be looking at and building product for,” Alarie says.
This expertise should ensure “that the way we are solving those labor and employment issues nicely dovetails with how attorneys who are practicing in the area approach those kinds of problems,” Alarie adds.
The law firm and the legal tech company will start by setting up a module that will allow lawyers to seek predictive information about Americans with Disabilities Act litigation in California, Shenkman says.
While Fisher Phillips assists Blue J Legal in building out its technology for use in a wide variety of employment matters across the United States, it will have exclusive access to the tool for two years before it is made more broadly available, according to Shenkman. It is too early to tell what the pricing for the U.S. product will be, Alarie says.
Blue J Legal’s Canadian employment law product includes a module focused on the duty to accommodate disabilities, as well as a variety of other modules, such as sexual harassment, worker classification and constructive dismissal.
Benjamin Alarie, CEO and co-founder at Blue J Legal.
A lawyer would start using the Blue J L&E tool by answering a series of questions about the facts of their case. The product then reviews relevant case law and produces a prediction of the likely outcome that includes its level of confidence in the prediction indicated by a percentage figure.
Read full article at. https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/law-firm-teams-up-with-canadian-legal-tech-company-on-ai-powered-case-prediction-tool
