Thousands of law firms across the U.S. can soon access legal AI tools developed by a Vancouver-based AI-powered legal search platform.
Caseway AI Legal Ltd. announced last week it has signed a deal with AffiniPay, a U.S. fintech company that owns leading legal payment management software MyCase, along with several other legal management platforms.
Following the deal, MyCase users will gain access to Caseway’s automation software, which is integrated into the platform and allows them to identify relevant case law, review court documents, and manage legal workflows.
“It's a very large contract with thousands of law firms that we’ll be entering in the States, so we need to quickly improve our infrastructure to handle that many users,” said Alistair Vigier, co-founder and CEO of Caseway.
“If we can execute on it, that would take us to a very significant company based locally.”
Vigier said the company, which currently has five employees, will need to hire more than 20 team members—mainly developers and customer service staff—by the end of the year to fulfil the contract’s requirements.
A former legal industry professional, Vigier said he launched Caseway almost a year ago after experiencing firsthand how challenging it can be to sift through hundreds of pages of legal information and documents.
“I thought AI could actually be used to go through that, so we started collecting all the information from courts, tribunals, and boards, and putting it into one place,” he said.
Users can search legal documents or court decisions on Caseway. They can also upload prior case documents and have the platform automatically complete forms based on that information, according to Vigier.
“[An organization] could upload, let’s say, 100,000 employment agreements signed in the past, and then ask questions like: How many of these agreements are out of date? How many contain a specific clause?” he said.
“Our AI would analyze all 100,000 documents and pull that information out for you.”
Caseway became the subject of controversy last November when the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), a non-profit legal database, filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging that it scraped content from the CanLII database without permission and offered it to paying users.
Caseway, however, denied the accusation and argued that it uses only public domain court documents obtained directly from the courts.
Vigier said the lawsuit has given the company significant exposure and led to an increase in user subscriptions.
No final decision has been issued in the case.
