On a special “on location” episode of The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert sits down with vLex’s Damien Riehl for a hands-on demonstration of the new generative AI tool called Vincent AI. While at the Ark KM Conference, Riehl explains that vLex has amassed a huge legal dataset over its 35 year history which allows them to now run their own large language models (LLM). The recent merger between vLex and Fastcase has combined their datasets to create an even more robust training corpus.

Riehl demonstrates how Vincent AI works by having it research a question on trade secret law and employee theft of customer lists. It retrieves relevant cases, statutes, regulations, and secondary sources, highlighting the most relevant passages. It summarizes each source and provides a confidence rating on how well each excerpt answers the initial question. Vincent AI then generates a legal memorandum summarizing the relevant law. Riehl explains how this is more trustworthy than a general chatbot like ChatGPT because it is grounded in real legal sources.

Riehl shows how Vincent AI can compare legal jurisdictions by generating memorandums on the same question for California, New York, the UK, and Spain. It can even handle foreign language sources, translating them into English. This allows for efficient multi-jurisdictional analysis. Riehl emphasizes Vincent AI’s focus on asking straightforward questions in natural language rather than requiring complex prompts.

Looking ahead, Riehl sees potential for Vincent AI to leverage external LLMs like Anthropic’s Claude model as well as their massive dataset of briefs and motions to generate tailored legal arguments statistically likely to persuade specific judges on particular issues. He explains this requires highly accurate tagging of documents which they can achieve through symbolic AI. Riehl aims to continue expanding features without requiring lawyers to become AI prompt engineers.

On access to justice, Riehl believes AI can help legal aid and pro bono attorneys handle more matters more efficiently. He also sees potential for AI assistance to pro se litigants to promote fairer outcomes. For judges, AI could help manage pro se cases and expedite decision-making. Overall, Riehl is optimistic about AI augmenting legal work over the next two years through ongoing improvements.

Riehl discusses vLex’s new Vincent AI system and its ability to efficiently research legal issues across jurisdictions and across languages. He provides insight into the technology’s development and potential while emphasizing understandable user interaction. The conversation highlights AI’s emerging role in legal services to increase productivity, insight, and access to justice.

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠ |  ⁠Spotify⁠ | YouTube (NEW!)

Links:

vLex Vincent AI

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Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠

⁠Transcript


Continue Reading vLex’s Damien Riehl on Examining vLex’s New Vincent AI (TGIR Ep. 227)

The Geek In Review Podcast – Episode 45

After a week of Washington, DC heat and humidity, we are back to discuss all things legal information with a slant toward technology and management. We have a recap of the American Association of Law Libraries annual conference, #AALL19, where Marlene runs through her packed schedule of events which she attended, presented, or wished she’d attended. Greg was just happy to rotate off the AALL Executive Board, which he’s been a part of for most of this decade. Don’t worry…. there’s still plenty of other AALL work for him to do.
On this episode, Marlene and Greg go international for the topics. We talk with Lluis Faus and Masoud Gerami of vLex about the recent merger of Gerami’s longtime foreign legal information platform, Justis. Faus and Gerami tell us the story of how they were able to blend the two platforms together, and the process of how they are able to pull together information from over 30 different countries, all with different levels of transparency and access to their legal information.

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Information Inspirations
France recently outlawed the use of judicial analytics which allows for the searching and identifying the names of the judges. We reached out to Tara Tubman-Bassirian, a French lawyer practicing in the UK, about the reasoning behind France’s criminalization of judicial data. Tubman-Bassirian says that the reasoning rests somewhere between the country’s effort to protect its Civil Law structure and the anonymity of the judges, and a flat out fear of what technology might be bringing in the ways of analytics, AI, and other unknown advancements.

Continue Reading Ep. 45 – vLex’s Lluis Faus and Masoud Gerami on Foreign Legal Research – France’s Judicial Analytics (Over)Reaction – AALL Recap