Rollout of litigation tools comes amid reports that some lawyers remain skeptical of AI
Artificial intelligence platform Alexi is launching a new suite of tools for legal document generation and analysis this week – the latest addition to what the company hopes will eventually become a comprehensive toolbox for litigators, Alexi CEO Mark Doble told Canadian Lawyer on Monday.
“Most of the documents that you can think of that are generated or analyzed in the course of litigation – there will be some functionality for us to help,” Doble says, adding that the company plans to roll out several additional features over the coming year. “We want to build functionality for every single use case that a litigator might encounter, substantively and procedurally.”
The announcement comes amid recent reports that many in the legal profession remain hesitant about incorporating generative AI into their practices. Some law firm leaders also expressed concerns that getting buy-in from lawyers could be a challenge to adopting AI tools.
But Doble thinks the industry is ready.
“There are several concerns that emerged right after ChatGPT was launched,” he says, pointing to the discourse around generative AI’s impact on the education of future lawyers, security and privacy, and the frequency of so-called hallucinations – the misleading or outright false information produced by generative AI platforms that can look beguilingly accurate.
“I think across all of these dimensions, we're in a totally different spot now than we were almost two years ago now, when ChatGPT first came out,” Doble says. “Our observations now are that… people are learning more, learning faster, and becoming better lawyers way quicker because of tools like this.”
He says best practices around security, privacy, and accuracy have also evolved. Doble notes that Alexi does not train AI models on sensitive, confidential information and fully encrypts data both at rest and in motion.
Among the new features Alexi is launching this week are tools that will allow lawyers to upload legal documents and generate a summary; track their litigation timelines with all their case documents and activities all located in one place; organize their litigation files; and access an AI conversational assistant to answer routine and complex legal questions across several jurisdictions.
The goal is to help lawyers with “the two big parts of litigation: understanding what the law is and understanding what the evidence is,” Doble says. The conversational assistant tool approaches questions using retrieval-augmented generation – a technique that combines the capabilities of traditional information retrieval systems (like databases and searches) with those of generative large language models.
If a family lawyer handling a divorce asks the conversational model how to “impute income to a spouse to get fair spousal support and child support,” for example, the tool can identify relevant case law and legislation and assess the factors involved in the case, Doble says. The tool could then help the lawyer identify what documents they need to gather and uncover novel arguments they can make.
In the coming months, Alexi will continue to roll out new features, including a tool for generating pleadings.
“If you're submitting AI-drafted documents directly to court, hopefully, they've at least been reviewed by human lawyers, of course. But is this going to increase or decrease the number of errors or inaccuracies submitted into court?” Doble says.
“What we're seeing is that the ability for lawyers now to reduce the number of errors is significant, and as long as lawyers are still reviewing the work products drafted by AI in the same way they'd be reviewing work products drafted by a student or a junior associate, the capabilities of the technology are so great that overall, we're going to see a significant reduction in errors by lawyers across the board,” he adds.
