LINK TO AI CASE LAW SEARCH (DEMO)
This is like a new feature in the traditional legal search engines (e.g. Westlaw, Lexis), adding technology similiar to what is used by Google search and ChatGPT. Type a query in natural language, roughly similar to what you would in Google. It can be phrases, an issue, or a question. You can add additional context explaining your query. For the top 5 case results, a large language model writes a summary, and an analysis of the relevance of the case to your query, with paragraph references. As with most AI right now, it is one tool among many. It will not replace your entire workflow.
It is not an all-powerful magic genie giving you, on the first try, The Answer.
It is much more like an intern who can skim cases for you, and write notes as to whether cases are relevant to your quick question.
Much like traditional searches, the more specific and precise the words used in the query, the better the results. Even with natural language search, the words and meaning of the query is matched with the words and meaning of the Judgment. The more the query looks like a relevant passage in the Judgment, the better the results. E.g. "does the Tribunal have jurisdiction ..." is likely to be better than "can the Tribunal ..."
In this demo, being run at minimal cost, using free trial large language model services, the top 5 hits from the natural language search will be analysed by a large language model. Technically, it is trivial to scale up to the top 30 or top 100 hits, and have it automatically do additional rounds of searching and ranking. Quality of results will improve. But where there are many users, costs of running it will be high.
Though, a thought about the near future - in the past year or so, the price of widely available large language models of the same quality have gone down in the region of 10x. Tens of billions of USD have been poured by tech giants into AI infrastructure. AI will get cheaper and more reliable. This will already make a big difference. We'll soon have large language models analysing documents en masse. A summary and preliminary analysis for every single document.
Like any one-off search, it's hit-or-miss whether a helpful case appears in the top 5 results. Here is an example of the AI case law search turning up a promising start:
