AI and entrepreneurship in the legal sector

The fourth event at IE Law School’s ieLawX event on May 18 was a series of talks from expert entrepreneurs in the legal tech industry.

The first speaker was Pablo Arredondo, whose company is called Case Text. He explained that litigation records encode a huge amount of legal context, and we can datamine these records forctailored results.. His technology allows you to drag and drop a brief into the system to be analyzed, allowing you to rank cases in a much more intuitive way.

Next up was Gurinder Sangha, professor, founder of Lit IQ and Intelligize. His startups respond to a problem: lawyers make a lot of mistakes. The average merger agreement has doubled in size and lawyers don’t have as much time as they used to. Sangha’s company helps lawyers avoid mistakes like repetitions, incorrect definitions, and ambiguities by analyzing documents for these issues.

Jay Mandal spoke next, founder and CEO of Law Pivot, a startup that provides same-day legal advice online. The site uses rule-based AI to find out how many questions each lawyer answers and how well they answered them in order to rank and reward the lawyers. Later, AI can learn from the data in order to answer future questions without a human.

After Mandal was, José Medina and Cristina Retana, speaking about Wolters Kluwer, which assesses the probability of a case’s success, duration, and best litigation strategy. Cristina explained that machine learning systems like this one must be trained by experts: “Technology itself does not learn. Humans have to program it or teach it.”

Jesús María Boccio was the next to pitch his startup, a voice recognition software for lawyers called Speechware. Boccio points out that lawyers are not trained as tech expert or analysts, and this technology fills that gap by taking care of the tech side of a lawyer’s job. It started out as an application he created for his own needs, and is now the official provider of speech recognition systems to the European Union and the United Nations.

Last but not least, Martí Manent talked about elAbogado.com, a website that helps people find the right lawyer. According to Manent, most people find lawyers through word of mouth, so they end up with an attorney that doesn’t meet their needs. On elAbogado you can talk to a bot or a lawyer and manage a whole case from your smartphone. Manent says that “a marketplace is good for the industry, but it needs rules and transparency.”

The goal of these talks was to promote innovation in the legal field, a core value of IE Law School. The school promotes an entrepreneurial spirit in students so that they don’t just adapt to the rapidly changing world—rather, they’re the ones driving it.