Artificial Intelligence has already made headway into law. And while the stirrings can be felt across the globe, India hasn’t lagged behind in adopting AI as a legal help resource. Earlier, AIM reported about Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas becoming Asia’s first law firm to integrate AI software. Cashing in on the AI wave and the recent push by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Supreme court towards digitizing the Indian legal system, India is seeing the launch of its very own virtual legal research assistant powered by AI. Simply put, a robot attorney.
Legal research and analysis platform Casemine, a NCR-based startup founded by Aniruddha Yadav, has pioneered the introduction of next-gen legal research platforms in India. The startup has leveraged AI to unearth latent linkages between case laws, thereby making research more in-depth and comprehensive. The proprietary tools enable researchers to look beyond a mere key word based search (an old technology with severe limitations). In law, the extent of search is constrained by the extent of keywords known on a given legal proposition.
AI powered legal research assistants are automating research
CaseIQ, a virtual legal research assistant obtains highly relevant search results directly from a brief (or other associated legal document), bypassing the need to reformulate case facts into searchable legal propositions. The AI powered research assistant can read a set of case notes and search through the entirety of Indian case law database in moments and crank out personalized recommendations on what to research next. What sets CaseIQ apart is the ability to understand the context involved in the document uploaded, rather than just trying to present case laws where a given keyword proposition is found.
CaseIQ—improving legal research
CaseIQ automatically analyzes the language of the brief. It then feeds this information into a complex predictive algorithm that leverages the latest data science technology, to highlight potential missing points of law, or alternative arguments. CaseIQ offers suggestions in the form of keywords, acts or landmark case laws to make your research more in-depth and comprehensive. Globally, CARA, ROSS Intelligence have set the precedent in AI research and are helping firms in finding relevant cases through natural language search.
According to Yadav, AI platform could lead to ground-breaking results in the Indian context. “At CaseMine, we’ve successfully mapped Indian case law (and soon US and UK case law) in never before seen granularity by combining cutting-edge advancements in artificial intelligence and visualization with modern Western legal research concepts,” he said.
The team, made up of IIM-grads works under the able guidance of ex-Chief Justice (Kolkata High Court) to bring artificial intelligence in the domain of legal technology, reveals Yadav.
“CaseIQ, tries to understand the context from the case notes. Thus, you don’t need to break down case facts into searchable keyword propositions and then experiment with permutations of keyword combinations to hit upon the relevant case laws.
CaseIQ advantage
Stating the CaseIQ advantage, Yadav explained how AI-powered technology has brought forth a whole new universe of on point case laws and latent linkages that legacy systems using keyword retrieval are unable to find.
- CaseIQ reduces research time between 5% to 50% of what is needed on legacy systems
- A research project lasting a couple of weeks can be condensed into several hours.
- There are cases where senior lawyers get stumped by on point cases they never knew of but were retrieved by CaseIQ. This extra body of knowledge/understanding is a serious advantage and the difference between winning and losing
For Yadav, an IIT-Madras alumnus with a Ph. D in Theoretical Physics, the vision is for a mobile, paperless practice, complemented by the ability to directly retrieve and feed documents to the AI platform. This is where CaseMine steps in — an end-to-end solution to a legal practice’s archiving, drafting, and research needs.
Given an under the hood peek into CaseIQ and how it is driven by AI, Yadav says the data science of networks is leveraged here to make legal research (the search for applicable precedent within the network of case laws) less time consuming and more efficient. “We have used NLP, text analytics techniques and network analysis to design a virtual legal research assistant CaseIQ,” he shared.
Inception: Data science to the rescue of ailing Indian legal system
When asked about how he got started on the AI platform, Yadav said, “ You know about the buzz that data science, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, are creating and measuring up to. Well before it became mainstream (circa 2012), us quantitative types (theoretical physicists, applied mathematicians, computer scientists etc) were already using the mathematical and computational machinery that today we call data science routinely in our own academic pursuits.”
It was at Mount Sinai wresting between mathematical modelling and computation to understand a very special type of complex network and a meeting with the now retired Justice Jainarayan Patel, formerly Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court), that Yadav decided to apply data science to legal research.
Casemine.com is backed by its parent company Gauge Analytics that was founded in 2013. In addition to CaseIQ, CaseMine has other features Case Similarity, Case Alerts, Case Management and is also backed by a visualization tool that allows users to get a visual search approach of the most relevant and landmark case laws.
