Student Legal Chatbot Project Endures Growing Pains, Emerges as Enterprise Technology
The project by former University of Cambridge students moved away from its roots as a criminal law generalist to a tool used to assess the likelihood of success for legal claims.
August 02, 2017 at 11:29 AM
5 minute read
Chatbots, much like artificial intelligence, have captured popular attention and fear in the last year. Within the legal community especially, the idea of a pre-programmed “bot” interacting with clients in lieu of a practicing attorney has generated a lot of interest and capital, but also a lot of very rigorous scrutiny.
The team behind LawBot, a chatbot designed by a group of recent law graduates from the University of Cambridge, learned firsthand about the legal community's conflicting feelings about such technology. While the chatbot they put forward got largely laudatory press (including my own ), it drew some sharp criticism from legal bloggers about its effectiveness.
LawBot has since rebranded as Elexirr and shifted its approach. While the company has retained the chatbot infrastructure that originally drew interest to the project, managing director Ludwig Bull said that it altered the chatbot to assess the likelihood that a particular legal problem would fare well in court with a reported 71 percent accuracy. The chatbot will operate through Facebook Messenger .
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