Beck: Big improvement in AI in recent months
A free artificial intelligence (AI) platform that allows consumers to obtain a report on their legal problem and get help from thousands of UK lawyers has been launched.
Christian Beck, founder and chief executive of legal software firm LEAP, said he did not want people “using AI without the help of lawyers”, nor did he want “lawyers to be replaced by AI”.
LawConnect operates as a subsidiary of LEAP and has 25 staff in the UK and in Australia, where LEAP is based.
The next step would be expansion later this year to Canada and the US, where the service is already in a “soft launch” phase.
LawConnect, which has 17,400 users in the UK, covers all the main areas of consumer law, along with commercial and criminal law, and uses an AI assistant to ask consumers questions.
Mr Beck said case summaries generated by LawConnect could be sent, if the consumer wished, to lawyers who were users of LEAP. He said LEAP had around 24,000 users in the UK, 60% of whom were lawyers.
“We are always looking to help our clients get more legal matters,” he said. “The technology is changing very quickly. The hardest part is connecting good quality lawyers with it. AI on its own can be good, but it’s a bit risky.
“I’m not aware of any product that uses AI to provide information and connect people to lawyers the way that LawConnect does.
“Most people when they have a legal problem will chat with AI about it, but it won’t connect them with lawyers to get the next level of help. Nobody else has the reach with lawyers in the UK and Australia that we do.”
Mr Beck said there had been a “big improvement” in what AI could do in recent months in terms of reasoning and deep research.
Blogs were a particularly good source of legal content, and AI could through deep research check that content against other sources.
“We started off by getting lawyers to check what the AI was doing, but what we’ve found is that the AI is better in most situations and certainly much faster.”
Mr Beck said the challenge was to get busy lawyers to engage.
“The transition to AI is an important one. AI without lawyers is a bit dangerous. This is a ‘best of both worlds’ solution – that’s why we’re making it free.”
Mr Beck said consumers would only have access to one lawyer at a time. The “primary criteria” for matching a lawyer to a case summary was how much experience a lawyer had in a particular matter type.
“We allow lawyers to look at the case summaries and contact the consumers they think they can help. Consumers do not have to connect with them – we ask them if they want to link up with a lawyer.
“There are more consumers wanting help than lawyers able to help them. It’s a worldwide problem. Once a lawyer offers to connect, we don’t offer the case to anyone else.
“As people transition to AI, the most important thing is that they are supported by lawyers. We don’t want people using AI without the help of lawyers. Nor do we want lawyers to be replaced by AI.”
Looking to the future, Mr Beck said AI would reduce the workload of lawyers in getting the data they needed to work on cases, whether they involved family, estate planning or personal injury law.
It was a question of building trust in AI among consumers, so they allowed it to look at their emails, texts and photos, and could, for example, show how much time a father was spending time with his children or how healthy a person was before an accident.
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