AltaML, a leading applied AI studio, and Compass Law, an independent Canadian legal publisher, announced the launch of Jurisage AI, a joint venture leveraging the parties’ expertise in artificial intelligence and legal innovation.
According to AltaML, Jurisage AI expands a relationship and collaboration in place since September 2020 when AltaML and its co-CEO joined the Legal Innovation Data Institute (LIDI), as founding member and advisor, respectively. LIDI was initially launched by Compass to lower the barrier to technological innovation in law through providing members controlled access to the Compass case law collection for non-profit and non-commercial uses. The potential and scope of that opportunity uncovered by AltaML through a year of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning(ML) research and prototype development opened the door to establishing a commercial venture with Compass. As co-founders of Jurisage AI, AltaML supplies the AI expertise and Compass supplies the legal data and market expertise.
Jurisage products will prioritize workflows that deliver the best and highest value insights in response to the narrowest and simplest input, as AltaML claims. While the primary focus will be on retail product development, Jurisage also intends to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) to support connection and integration of its AI models with service providers and enterprise users. The first retail product in development, MyJr (“My Junior”) is an intelligent tool built to save time and effort in legal knowledge gathering. MyJr automatically identifies case citations appearing on any website, in Word and PDF, and delivers an overlay view of the insights and details legal professionals rely on to validate the importance of the cited case to their immediate needs – all without requiring the reader to leave their page or switch away from their preferred legal research tool.
MyJr is one result of AltaML’s work in 2021 in building legal research assistant prototypes and case law NLP models that classify sentences as pertaining to one or more of Facts, Issues, Law, Analysis or Conclusions (FILAC). MyJr will initially be offered in Canada and the United States and will rely on the Compass case law database as well as a collection of U.S. case law acquired by Jurisage.
In collaboration with Compass CEO Colin Lachance, MyJr product development has been led by AltaML VP Product, Chris O’Brien and the underlying Jurisage AI legal data architecture development is being led by AltaML Director of Data Science, Dr. Juliano Rabelo.
Colin Lachance will serve as Jurisage CEO. He said this about the venture: “The legal market is increasingly alive to the potential and promise of AI. Through the incredible talent available at AltaML and that of the legal professionals we will recruit to the team to augment our appreciation for where we should direct our energies, we are excited to pursue a mission of unlocking the knowledge trapped in legal data and in closing the gap between questions and answers.”
“We’ve been working closely with Compass Law for some time and could not be more thrilled about the launch of Jurisage AI,” said Cory Janssen, AltaML co-CEO. “Data is a prerequisite for AI, and Compass Law showed tremendous foresight in acquiring legal datasets. With the parties’ deep, complementary expertise, Jurisage already has a first product in development addressing a major pain point in law practice. We’re very excited to see Jurisage well on its way to elevating the possible in the legal space.”
AltaML is building a portfolio of industry-specific AI software companies. In addition to Jurisage, other launched ventures include AlphaLayer (investment management), BlueMarvel.AI (industrial operations), System3 (executive recruitment) and Sylvester.ai (pet health).
Jurisage AI seeks to elevate access to justice and directs deep legal publishing and innovation expertise together with machine learning and applied AI specialists towards building powerful AI products that support the legal industry. Based in Ottawa and Edmonton, Jurisage aims to build a community of partners, suppliers, and employees who support legal innovation.
