Login | May 02, 2024
Paxton AI wants to be your legal AI
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: April 5, 2024
What this (legal) world needs is a portable, personal, iterative legal AI chatbot that brings the power of something like ChatGPT4 into a small law office.
That’s what Paxton (https://www.paxton.ai/), a 2024 Startup Alley winner, wants to be.
And maybe it will be one day. They are working hard on the engineering side to make Paxton into a small law office’s dream AI.
On its website, Paxton says that it is “an AI legal assistant that helps you: quickly learn new areas of law; deepen discovery; rapidly draft and compare documents; and much, much more with accurate citations.”
Sounded like a challenge to me, so I signed up for my free month and went for it.
On its ChatGPT-type interface, I asked it a fairly complex question about any recent decisions on gerrymandering from the Ohio Supreme Court.
It took a minute or two to think about it—far longer than most AI models, which seemed like a good thing. And then it came back with an answer.
The good: It found the relevant cases and created a reasonable narrative.
The bad: It did not, in fact, get the cites right.
For the most recent case, it only got the case file number and not the published book citation.
Why?
Pretty simple.
The large language model (LLM) that it used, which had to have been Open AI’s, only had access to information before April 2023.
Right case, wrong cite.
In terms of the iteration, it was a several paragraph overview of the cases and their history. It was pretty good for, say, a high school senior/ college freshman.
You couldn’t use it in a brief, but you could use the basic concepts and upgrade the language.
I then called the company and had a nice chat with their press interface person. I showed him my work.
Yes, they use ChatGPT4 or any other LLM that would work.
It’s a small startup company that obviously can’t afford the level of computing power that generative AI requires. They’re just creating a legal interface with publicly available LLMs.
Note: They don’t have any lawyers/paralegals/other legal professionals on staff to train the chatbot in the law. All the staff are engineers.
The two founders aren’t lawyers either, although one of them has a background in compliance for a government agency.
The press guy told me that the company started out looking at compliance (in their wheelhouse) but is now branching out into general law (not in their wheelhouse).
However, take a look.
Like I said, it can give you a pretty good pathway to answer a legal question, even if it can’t really write for you.
You can check out Paxton AI for free for a month. Give it a test run and see how you like it.