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The Legal Magic 8-Ball An Interview With:
Jerrold Soh Co-Founder, Lex Quanta By: Kelvin Tan KELVIN Tan sat down with Jerrold Soh, one of four founders of Lex Quanta, at Collision 8, home to the Singapore Academy of Law’s Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP). FLIP is an initiative aimed at cultivating and supporting legal tech start-ups, and amongst those firms which have benefitted is Lex Quanta, a startup which aims to build legally-sensitive data analytics solutions. Jerrold and his former schoolmates started Lex Quanta in September 2016, with each of them strategically handling four different roles – data, coding, business and law. This formula proved to work wonders, with one of the team’s most notable achievements being the development of a simulator early this year that can predict the division of assets in a divorce case. The inspiration behind Lex Quanta was Jerrold’s eagerness to find out how “junior lawyers [could] be replaced by AI (artificial intelligence)”1 in the future. We dug a little deeper into the inspiration and workings of this divorce outcome simulator, and probed Jerrold on his thoughts about the evolution of AI in the legal industry. Kelvin: For the uninitiated amongst us, would you mind giving us a brief summary of what Lex Quanta is, and the services that it provides? Jerrold: Okay, so as a start-up, Lex Quanta does two things. Firstly, we provide data consultancy services to legal organizations on how to structure, manage and exploit the data they have. Oftentimes, this data is in a form not immediately usable for machine learning and other purposes. So, we’re talking about documents, sometimes not even scanned, which present a unique challenge for data science in general. As such, Lex 1 The Straits Times, “NUS law and economics student, along with three peers, creates divorce outcome simulator”, https://www. straitstimes.com/singapore/nus-law-and-economics-student-alongwith-three-peers-creates-case-outcome-simulator, accessed on 30 July 2018.
Quanta comes in to suggest ways for them to use and structure their data. Secondly, we create our own legal software; the main thing I can talk about is our outcome simulator for the division of matrimonial assets under Singaporean divorce law. To put it simply, after you input some facts, the system can tell you, based on what it has learned from the case law, an estimation of what the division will be like. That’s what you would call an AI system that does an outcome simulation. So that’s what we do in general. Consultancy and our own software. Kelvin: How might a lawyer use Lex Quanta to help him? Jerrold: For lawyers, the main value right now is in saving research time. For example, if you get a new case, and you want to have a very quick sense of what the outcome will be like, that’s when an outcome simulator will be useful. You can enter in the facts and within 5-10 minutes, you can get a first-cut outcome. We don’t claim that the simulator will be a 100% exact, but it will be akin to briefly reading through the case law for an hour and getting a sense of what the likely outcome will be. Kelvin: How would you put such common law rules into the simulator? Because each case is so unique, especially in the family law context, how do you reduce the intricacies of each case to something a computer can understand? Jerrold: That’s a very good question; I can’t share too much about this, but essentially, when you build a model, you try to capture patterns within that domain. As lawyers, we know that the judges don’t pull out random numbers but follow set frameworks when arriving at their decision. Specifically, with regard to divorce, there is case law in the division of matrimonial assets talking about calculating ratios for division and aggregating them. So that would be the case of ANJ v ANK [2015] SGCA 34, a Court of Appeal case. 129