LawConnect wants to use AI to level legal playing field

AI tools are everywhere, but self-made tech titan Christian Beck aims to offer a different approach with his artificial-intelligence powered platform LawConnect. 

Beck, the founder and CEO of LEAP Legal Software, ranked 162nd in The Australian‘s list of the country’s richest 250 with an estimated net worth of $996 million, aims to make accessing legal information free, seamless, and accessible to everyone. 

LEAP’s parent company ATI Global – which Beck founded and retains a 58% stake in – saw an operating profit of $111.36 million in the year to June 30, versus $36.69 million the previous year. With borrowings increased to $2.7 billion from $2.51 billion and financing costs totalling $366.8 million, they’ve seen a net loss of $241.5 million.

The all-new LawConnect platform – which shares a name with Beck’s $1.6M boat that won last year’s Sydney Hobart Yacht Race in dramatic, last-minute fashion – aims to give consumers personalised, secure legal information using the power of advanced AI. Beck claims the service, which combines AI with a “human lens”, is the first of its kind available in Australia.

How LawConnect works

After submitting a question, LawConnect’s AI assistant will guide users through a series of follow-ups before generating a personalised report with relevant information tailored to individuals’ specific situations. The aim of the service is to deploy AI to help people who have legal problems but cannot afford a lawyer, ensuring justice is available to all. It’s all about making the legal process more convenient and less daunting.

“If you’re in a family law matter and there are overseas custody disputes, that’s a pretty specific case,” Beck told SmartCompany. “And we can find lawyers who have experience in that to verify the questions, which normally takes a long time for the consumer to get.”

With people turning to AI for therapy, horoscope readings and now their legal matters, there’s a rising trend of people feeling safe confiding their most personal issues to artificial intelligence. 

“You may not want to talk about [your case] with a lawyer because there can be very personal issues that people will want help with,” says Beck.  “The great thing about AI is that it’s pretty good with those questions. It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t even know who you are, so it’s a nice way of answering things that many people struggle with.”

As more people have their answers verified by real lawyers, the platform will get better at answering similar questions. 

“We can then feed into the AI the previously verified answer that we know is correct – but we also have another lawyer verify the AI’s new response, and that makes it a lot more accurate,” says Beck. 

“When AI gets it wrong, it’s normally that the information isn’t available online and so a lot of it comes down to filling those holes in the knowledge base, and that’s where the verification process really helps a lot.” 

How AI removes legal pain points

Beck also explains that LawConnect “uses the opportunity of AI to take away pain points like the automation of conflict of interest checking to make it more efficient”.

It also means lawyers can help far more people. Beck adds.

“They can give more effective and better value for money services,” he says. “If something used to cost $10K to solve and it can be solved for $2K, that’s satisfying for the lawyer,  and it means a lot more people can be helped than in the old regime. That’s the sort of impact that good AI with the right framework can actually deliver.”

“The other issue is that you often have to tell your story multiple times. You tell one person, and they say, ‘Oh, go see this person’, and you find yourself telling it again and again. The great thing about LawConnect is you tell it once, and it directs you to the right person who can read your report. It helps a lot because often the story could be quite complicated or painful to go over again, so the platform just makes it easier to get it solved.”

Another point Beck makes is that “getting help from the court is hard because if you go in self-represented, you’ve got to tell your story in a format that the court accepts, generally called an affidavit”.

“For you to write up your story and send it to your lawyer before having them retype it all out manually it can be really expensive. With AI, you can articulate your problem and upload any information, get help finding a lawyer and have them pull the info from the AI, which dramatically reduces the cost of getting it into court.”

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