Supreme Advocacy and vLex to co-develop AI-driven appellate workflow tools
Ottawa — October 9, 2018
The best artificial intelligence will not outperform the best lawyers. But what happens when the lawyers of one of Canada’s leading boutique appellate law firms oversee the development of AI-driven workflow tools to improve their service to clients? Is it possible to “bottle” a lawyer’s strategic expertise and share that with others?
Through engagement as advocates, agents, advisors and authors, the legal team at Supreme Advocacy LLP, led by former Executive Legal Officer Supreme Court of Canada and former National President Canadian Bar Association, Eugene Meehan, Q.C., have developed unparalleled insight into Canadian appeal court practice and advocacy. They literally wrote the book (Supreme Court of Canada Manual: Practice and Advocacy, Canada Law Book and Meehan & Sharpe on Appellate Advocacy, Canada Law Book).
Now, in collaboration with vLex Canada (formerly Maritime Law Book) and international legal publisher and AI company vLex Networks, S.L., Supreme Advocacy will guide the development of workflow tools that optimize the use of Supreme Advocacy’s internal knowledge management resources and vLex’s information and technical expertise.
vLex and vLex Canada recently announced the availability of “Vincent,” the first AI-powered intelligent legal research assistant of its kind. Vincent can analyze documents in two languages (English and Spanish) from 9 countries (and counting), and is built ready to incorporate content not only from vLex’s expansive global collection, but also from internal knowledge management resources, public sources and licensed databases simultaneously.
“Vincent is built on our Iceberg AI platform,” said Colin Lachance, vLex Canada CEO. “Iceberg was designed to support all of vLex’s global publishing activities, but really shows its strength when applied to combine our machine learning models and other AI tools, trained on global legal content, with the unique resources and insights of our partners in service of our partners’ objectives. We’re thrilled to be working with Supreme Advocacy, a legal team that has the insight, the data and a practical how-to sense of what’s needed to be more effective for their clients.”
“We want to unlock the power of our data,” said Thomas Slade, Partner at Supreme Advocacy. “Our firm has more than 50 combined years of appellate experience and an extensive collection of appellate documents and case summaries. This can be effectively mined and analyzed against the case law to help us capture the right argument, fact or reference. Whether looking to bolster a ground of appeal or searching for vulnerabilities in an opponent’s argument, we believe AI-powered research can give clients an edge.”
The focus on the collaboration was to initially develop tools solely for Supreme Advocacy to permit it to further differentiate its services from competitors. However, both vLex and Supreme Advocacy will explore how the results can be harnessed and made available in the form of research tools to others in the legal industry.
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Contacts:
Colin Lachance
CEO, vLex Canada
clachance@vlex.com
613–316–3290
Eugene Meehan, Q.C.
Managing Partner, Supreme Advocacy LLP
emeehan@supremeadvocacy.ca
613–695–8855
