AltaML and Compass Law Announce Launch of Jurisage for Legal AI

AltaML, a leading applied AI studio driven to elevate human potential, and Compass Law (Compass), an independent Canadian legal publisher and legal market innovator, are pleased to announce the launch of Jurisage AI (Jurisage), a joint venture leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and legal innovation. 

Jurisage expands on a relationship in place since September 2020 when AltaML and its co-CEO joined the Legal Innovation Data Institute (LIDI), as a founding member and advisor, respectively. LIDI was initially launched by Compass to lower the barrier to technological innovation in law through providing members controlled access to the Compass case law collection for non-profit and non-commercial uses.

The enormous potential and scope of that opportunity was uncovered by AltaML through a year of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) research and prototype development. It opened the door to establishing a commercial venture with Compass. As co-founders of Jurisage, AltaML supplies the AI expertise and Compass supplies the legal data and market expertise.

Jurisage knows that the law is complex, but believes legal products should not be. Accordingly, Jurisage products will prioritize workflows that deliver the best and highest value insights in response to the narrowest and simplest input. While the primary focus will be on retail product development, Jurisage also intends to develop application programming interfaces (APIs) to support connection and integration of its AI models with service providers and enterprise users.

The first retail product in development, My Junior (MyJr) is an intelligent tool that saves time and effort in legal knowledge gathering. MyJr automatically identifies case citations appearing on any website, in Word and even in PDF, and delivers an overlay view of the insights and details legal professionals rely on to validate the importance of the cited case to their immediate needs – all without requiring the reader to leave their page or switch away from their preferred legal research tool.

MyJr represents an evolution and extension of the work AltaML completed in 2021 in building legal research assistant prototypes and case law NLP models that classify sentences as pertaining to one or more of Facts, Issues, Law, Analysis or Conclusions (FILAC). MyJr will initially be offered in Canada and the United States and will rely on the Compass case law database as well as a collection of U.S. case laws acquired by Jurisage.

In collaboration with Compass CEO, Colin Lachance, MyJr product development has been led by AltaML VP Product, Chris O’Brien and the underlying Jurisage AI legal data architecture development is being led by AltaML Director of Data Science, Juliano Rabelo.

Lachance will serve as Jurisage’s CEO, “The legal market is increasingly alive to the potential and promise of AI. Through the incredible talent available at AltaML and that of the legal professionals we will recruit to the team to augment our appreciation for where we should direct our energies, we are excited to pursue a mission of unlocking the knowledge trapped in legal data and in closing the gap between questions and answers.”

“We’ve been working closely with Compass Law for some time and could not be more thrilled about the launch of Jurisage AI,” said Cory Janssen, AltaML Co-Founder and Co-CEO. “Data is a prerequisite for AI, and Compass Law showed tremendous foresight in acquiring legal data sets. With the parties’ deep, complementary expertise, Jurisage already has a first product in development addressing a major pain point in law practice. We’re very excited to see Jurisage well on its way to elevating the possible in the legal space.”

AltaML is building a portfolio of industry-specific AI software companies. In addition to Jurisage, other launched ventures include AlphaLayer, BlueMarvel.AI, System3, and Sylvester.ai.

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About AltaML

AltaML is an applied AI studio driven to elevate human potential, and builds relationships founded on shared beliefs around using AI for good. This work includes accelerating the AI adoption journey for organizations in the private and public sectors as well as growing a portfolio of industry-specific joint ventures to pursue product opportunities. In addition, AltaML operates talent accelerators to increase the pool of industry-ready data science talent while driving partners’ AI experimentation. With offices in Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto, AltaML is scaling rapidly to become the undisputed leader in responsible AI.

About Compass Law

Compass launched in 2016 by building on the 47-year legacy of Maritime Law Book (MLB), a leading Canadian legal publisher and highly respected editor of national and regional case law reporters. Since acquiring MLB’s extensive historical collection of reported and unreported Canadian judgments, its comprehensive and detailed topical taxonomy (Key Number System), and its relationship with Canadian courts for ongoing receipt of new judgments, Compass has provided stewardship over the Canadian case law content that has been published internationally through vLex and has supported innovative and exploratory uses of the content through, among other places, the non-profit Legal Innovation Data Institute.

About Jurisage AI

Jurisage AI seeks to elevate access to justice and directs deep legal publishing and innovation expertise together with world-class machine learning and applied AI specialists toward building powerful AI products that support an ecosystem of legal problem solvers. We are closing the gap between legal questions and answers by enabling legal professionals to access and synthesize complex legal information in the moment so they can outperform their best selves with quicker and more cost effective access to highly relevant and powerful insights. Based in Ottawa and Edmonton, we are building a community of partners, suppliers, and employees who support legal innovation.

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