The legal community in India is getting a major boost as artificial intelligence has made a way into the courtroom by managing cumbersome paperwork, carrying in-depth research, and more. With its unique offering, Gurgaon-based MikeLegal is the one most interesting startups in legal tech space in India. Analytics India Magazine got in touch with Anshul Gupta, Founder of Mike Legal to get a perspective of their work.

Currently, nine-people strong and expanding, the startup was founded by Gupta along with Ankit Yadav and Tushar Bhargava with an aim to give away technology accessibility to the legal domain. “We always saw AI coming to different sectors such as finance, education, healthcare or others but there was not much innovation happening in the legal domain. Either the tasks were done manually or products were highly expensive,” shares Gupta. That’s when they decided to explore the ‘legal’ road and develop solutions for the legal team.

MikeLegal Is Empowering The Legal Community In India

MikeLegal is a cutting edge toolset that helps the legal community to be more efficient by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence. With its offerings such as MikeTM Suite and Mike Litigator, it is trying to provide holistic solutions for law firms. “Mike legal is an AI-powered legal associate, which is built on an ecosystem of legal tools that are helping legal teams automate and conduct inefficient tasks much more efficiently with less expenditure,” says Gupta.

This basically means that they are using AI to build around different tools around the legal process which can be easily automated, mundane and where lawyers spend a lot of time finishing the task. Currently, with their solutions, they are focusing on the intellectual property domain using which legal teams are now able to conduct tasks in hours or even minutes that earlier used to take months.

“For instance, one of our tools, Mike TM Watch is able to analyse infringements for your portfolio in practically a day, which would take any legal team at least couple of weeks to do that because of the huge amount of data that we are looking at,” says Gupta. The tools look at crunching data and providing a lot of data points for you to strategise better and gives all this information in a short span of time.

How Is AI Crucial

The Mike Legal team has trained the system to understand the legal domain of intellectual property, more specifically around trademarks. They make use of a lot of technology such as machine learning, NLP and have also come up with their own image recognition systems. Denying to comment further on how it actually works, Gupta shares that all these technologies have helped them to give customers and legal teams a better dataset to work with. “We are trying to constantly improve on it with lawyer’s feedback,” adds Gupta.

Mike Legal Aims To Explore Various Avenues Of Legal System

While the Mike Legal is currently looking into IP domain, they are looking to explore into other avenues of the legal system as well. “We are aiming to pick one domain at a time and explore the inefficiencies around this domain to come up with the best solutions,” he says. Currently, they boast four products in the market, of which three of them are around trademark prosecution and one is around the case for research. These four products are MikeTM Search, MikeTM Watch, MikeTM Manager and MikeLitigator.

In the next two years, the team is planning to foray into domains such as tax, employment law and others.

Use Cases

The four products have different uses which Gupta explains below:

Mike TM Search: This product is allowing legal team to conduct trademark searches very easily. For instance, while filing a trademark you have to see if someone has a similar trademark or not, it helps in checking that. There are also instances where a trademark may be written in various permutation and combination. Let’s say FINAL can be written as FYNAL and lawyers might spend a lot of time thinking about permutations and combinations and a lot of data points are missed out. With their system lawyers can conduct these searches efficiently in less time with the use of artificial intelligence.

Mike TM Watch: With this product, the team is helping lawyers to analyse infringements to their portfolio. Every week around 8000-9000 trademarks come in which needs to be compared against their portfolio. Imagine there are 500 marked portfolios and we have to compare each one against 8000-9000, it becomes very difficult. Moreover, around 50% of these 8000 marks are logos which is difficult to go through manually. The Mike Legal team is providing them with an automated analysis of infringements with this product while giving them reports, a dashboard to customise and more. This drastically reduces the time and lawyers can identify more infringements.

Mike TM Manager: This is about managing the portfolio. Right now legal teams primarily use Excel sheets and they keep corresponding with the government website for any changes, which becomes very inefficient. Some of the challenges are that there is a large portfolio which becomes difficult to handle, lawyers keep changing which makes it difficult to keep a track of their progress, among others. In such cases, the product acts like a legal assistant automating the entire management part of their portfolio.

Mike Litigator: It is an AI-powered case law research tool, which primarily allows lawyers to conduct case of research very easily. It allows talking in simple English and asks questions such as ‘show me the case where the patent was won’ etc. It is able to understand the context of the lawyer’s question and show results relevant to them.  It leverages NLP and deep learning to help lawyers drastically reduce the time they spend on legal research. It uses AI to go through the humongous legal database and get you on-point answers in seconds.

Growth Story

Gupta shares that their journey has been good till now as they have been able to swell up their client portfolio to 40 clients today for which they have been able to create an AI-based ecosystem. Apart from expanding the product portfolio, they are also looking to expand globally into Europe, Australia, US and more.

Gupta attributes his growth story to Zeroth, as it came out to be at an important point when they had just started to grow. “Associating with them not only provided us with the market access but also funded us the initial amount of money we needed for us to fuel that growth. Having that access to the mentor has really helped us to go into the next level,” says Gupta.