Jus2vec: Intelligent Legal Research integrated with Text Editor

• Grant number: 21/08748-0
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Innovative Research in Small Business - PIPE
• Start date: February 01, 2022
• End date: November 30, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science
• Principal Investigator: Fernando José Vieira da Silva
• Grantee: Fernando José Vieira da Silva
• Company: F J V da Silva Tecnologia Informação Ltda
• CNAE: Desenvolvimento e licenciamento de programas de computador não-customizáveis
• City: Sorocaba
• Associated research grant: 18/01099-4 - Law2Vec: a legal document writing aid tool using artificial intelligence, AP.PIPE
• Associated scholarship(s): 22/06531-7 - Jus2vec: Intelligent Legal Research integrated with Text Editor, BP.TT; 22/07504-3 - Jus2vec: Intelligent Legal Research integrated with Text Editor, BP.TT; 22/04582-3 - Jus2vec: Intelligent Legal Research integrated with Text Editor, BP.TT; + associated scholarships 22/04344-5 - Jus2vec: Intelligent Legal Research integrated with Text Editor, BP.TT; 22/02033-2 - Jus2vec: intelligent legal research integrated with text editor, BP.TT; 22/02032-6 - Jus2vec: intelligent legal research integrated with text editor, BP.PIPE - associated scholarships

Abstract

Legal Research is strategic for lawyers. When a lawyer works on a very unusual case, s/he needs to find precedents to support his/her case. When s/he works with a common case, s/he still needs to understand how judges of the same court decide on similar situations, so s/he can elaborate an argumentation strategy aiming to win the case. However, according to our surveys, most lawyers consider that legal research is the most difficult and time-consuming task. That's because the search is done on the courts' websites using keywords. But there are many courts and the lawyer needs to try several keywords. Those websites return a lot of results, and most of them are not relevant to the case the lawyer is working on. Thus, lawyers spend hours reading decisions to interpret each case and find out which is actually more similar. We propose the development of Jus2vec, a legal research tool that consists of a plugin for Microsoft Word where the lawyer does legal research while drafting, without the need to access court's websites. The search is performed using modern Artificial Intelligence techniques, that understands similarities between the meaning of words in the legal context. (e.g. "moral" and "material") and rank results by relevance, as for the lawyer to save time and get better results in the search. In addition, Jus2vec maintains the unified base, with decisions collected from multiple courts. During Phase 1, we developed an MVP capable of performing intelligent search on decisions collected from 4 courts and stored on a unified basis, then we make it available for use by lawyers, showing that the project is viable technologically and its costs are scalable. For Phase 2, we will develop more essential functionality so that we can in fact monetize the product. These features require the continuity of research in the field of Artificial Intelligence. We also intend to collect decisions from courts of different states. The monetization of Jus2vec will be given through the sale of monthly subscriptions for each user. The focus will be on adapting the tool for use in offices that they work with a high volume of litigations, where lawyers have a very busy schedule and generally does not have the time to do adequate legal research. This customer segment has the advantage of being large offices, allowing to leverage the project billing. (AU)