How this law firm is taking legal-tech mainstream in the time of Covid-19

There's a trove of digital-data solutions that the legal fraternity has begun to adopt in the post-pandemic world. And Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas is at the thick of it

It wasn’t just the pandemic that forced lawyers and courts to adopt digital for daily business. In 2018, following a case where a student filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court after the latter barred entry in the courts on certain days, the top court ruled that proceedings should be live telecast online.

Now, just a month ago, a parliamentary committee on law and justice has submitted recommendations that virtual courts must go on saying “digital justice is cheaper and faster.”  

Besides virtual courts, there is a trove of digital-data solutions that the legal fraternity has been slow to adopt. This is now changing in the pandemic and post-pandemic world. And Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM) is in the thick of it.

Around 2017, CAM started an internal team to develop and implement artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and automation solutions to internal processes. In almost every case, lawyers have to sift through tons of historic cases, documents and filings to create arguments. They may also have to scrape the corporate universe while advising clients on patent filings or through the general course of due diligence.?

“This is called e-discovery,” said Komal Gupta, who heads the AI and innovation team at CAM. “If A is suing B for patent infringement, they both go to court for discovery. Law firms are given the data in physical or electronic form, and they have to manually scrape it (to find) for what they are looking for.”

Gupta said the firm has adopted a platform called Kira Systems, which offers an “Outlook-like” interface and a “coding channel”. Lawyers can write code for specific searches and label documents on the go. The platform even learns over time (using AI) and suggests documents it thinks are useful for the search.

The tool is from a Canadian start-up, and so it requires some realignment to be useful in Indian context, said Gupta, adding the experience is similar with other western solutions. “This was the motivation to develop our own,” she said. 

In 2019, CAM setup an incubator called Prarambh, with the goal to support the “domestic talent in developing quality LegalTech products, and significantly enhancing the interest in adoption of technology amongst the legal fraternity.”

Currently onto its second cohort, Prarambh offers two-month-long mentoring by legal experts, help in developing the product, and access to clients. Start-ups in the early stage can apply for the program before October 25. CAM does not invests in these start-ups by retains a right to invest later. “Sometimes we or our clients become the customers of these start-ups,” said Gupta.

AI-start-up Legal Mind was one of the start-ups that came out of the 2019 cohort. Its product derives analytics and insights out of court judgement and helps in search through a conversational chat-box. “Through the platform you could analyse the past rulings of a judge and predict, to some degree, which arguments he or she is more likely to side with,” said Anubhav Mishra, founder and chief executive officer.

“Once a banking client asked us if we could calculate the litigation cost of a certain kind of case, and we did that too” said Mishra, adding that the platform grew from merely being a search service to offering predictive insights through the course of the Prarambh program.

Leegality, a cloud-based e-stamp and e-document workflow platform, and JRTC Intern, a portal for law internships, are the other two start-ups that came out of Prarambh cohort 1.

“We believe the world will be a different place in the post Covid era, and that technology will be a massive differentiator. We want to continue our Prarambh journey in this spirit, and find and incubate the right talent,” said Rishabh Shroff, Partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas. “Our goal with Prarambh Cohort 2 is to be ahead of the curve in the areas that we have chosen to focus on in this occasion.”