I had the good fortune to sit down with Ed Walters, Chief Strategy Officer of vLex, earlier in the week to hear about the launch of a generative AI legal research platform by vLex.
With our work this year on Lou, an AI-powered publishing assistant, I am more than intrigued by AI applications being used for research and writing in the law.
Walking through a demo, it was clear that lawyers would not be going back to the way they’ve done research and related work in the past.
Imagine a client calling with a question about a complex IP issue. Lawyers would have typically taken information from the client – maybe even had the client come in, do research taking hours and prepare a memorandum for the client.
A lot of time, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of stress for the client and a lot of money.
With Vincent AI, a lawyer can gather info, generate a research memo and brief their client on where they stand, all without getting off this initial phone call. The work not complete, but certainly hours ahead at a fraction of the cost.
Vincent AI is positioned as a significant step forward for AI-powered legal analysis, because it is based on one of the world’s largest online law libraries.
vLex contains the law of more than 110 nations, and includes more than 1 billion cases, statutes, regulations, dockets, pleadings and motions in its collection. Vincent AI also uses secondary materials and expert treatises, many of which have expert analysis not included in other tools.
In an announcement on the release, vLex CEO Lluís Faus said “AI tools are only as good as the data they rely on, and the vLex law library is one of the largest collections of structured law on the planet, including leading expert commentary. That leads to unprecedented insights for legal tasks. For legal LLMs, this release is a major improvement. It is as big as the jump from ChatGPT to GPT4. The results are astonishing.”
The new Vincent AI tools already work in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, and Spain, in English and Spanish, with more jurisdictions to be added on a rolling basis.
Bob Ambrogi reports Vincent AI offers four key “skills” or methods for conducting research:
- Answer a Question: Provides a research memo answering a specific question.
- Build an Argument: Constructs memos supporting or refuting a particular legal argument.
- Compare Jurisdictions: Compares laws across multiple jurisdictions, including foreign-language jurisdictions, and can self-update.
- Analyze Documents: Analyzes briefs to offer a breakdown of the related legal authorities.
The AI ensures transparency by providing access to the actual sources it relied on and includes a feature to allow users to remove or add their own authoritative sources. It also uses a unique retrieval augmented generation (RAG) method to prevent hallucinations and to increase the accuracy of its findings.
The platform also includes other AI-driven features such as issue spotting, creating headnote summaries, and finding related authorities.
When I see powerful AI platforms such as Vincent, I can’t help but think about a blend of AI assisted legal publishing and AI assisted legal research.
Imagine writing a blog post on that same IP issue, something I’d want to do to maintain my thought leadership status, if a lawyer in that area, I’d want to instantly call on legal research and maybe develop a brief memo from Vincent while at the same time call on Lou to reduce my blogging time while improving the quality of my blog post.
Well done, vLex. The future is getting closer thanks to your efforts.
Law firms wishing to be notified as Vincent AI’s new skills become available may join the waitlist via the new vLex Insights Program at www.vlex.com/insights.