When Joanna Frivet’s husband ran into a legal problem while travelling abroad, he turned to an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot rather than disturb his wife, who is a lawyer, in the early hours of the morning in Ireland.
Half an hour later, he discovered that the bot had confidently cited a nonexistent law. It was not malicious. It happened because the bot had been trained on a broad data set and was unable to narrow its focus to deal with his specific problem.
Reflecting on her husband’s experience, Frivet began to realise just how poorly general AI performs in terms of legal accuracy.
Some law firms have already banned its use because inaccurate information has led lawyers to cite non-existent case law in court.
Frivet felt strongly that if consumers were not to be misled by AI, they needed an easy way to access accurate legal information, along with clear pricing for any follow-up advice.
Initially, Frivet didn’t see herself as the person to solve these issues. That changed when a friend with a tech background introduced her to a legal colleague who specialised in technology. They began to talk.
Frivet subsequently teamed up with lawyer Franziska Vulprecht, digital product designer Ulf Meyer, and software developer Ronan McGill. Together, they founded LegalMoov, a newly minted AI platform that provides legal information to the public and connects them with lawyers (with the costs outlined up front) if they need further help.
“At the moment, if someone wants legal information, they can either pay a minimum of €150 for a one-hour consultation or try their luck on Google or ChatGPT. There are also the free legal advice centres, but they are overworked and can only provide generalised information. This left a gap in the market for a service that could provide clear answers based on verified case law,” says Frivet, who has spent most of her legal career to date in The Hague prosecuting war crimes.
“We are first-to-market with accurate legal information delivered through an interactive chatbot with the follow-on connection to lawyers,” adds Frivet.
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“The technology has matured enough for us to create our platform, and there are also laws coming into force that will require people using general-purpose AI to be AI literate and able to cross-check their sources. Our sources will be built in which is an important USP for LegalMoov. In practice, this means we will include a link that brings the user directly to the law most applicable to their situation with a zero error rate.”
With the broad brushstrokes of the idea taking shape, Frivet approached Leitrim Local Enterprise Board. “I found them really encouraging and they provided a feasibility grant to get us started on our proof of concept,” she says. Frivet is on the New Frontiers start-up programme at ATU Sligo.
“We were very naive initially and hadn’t even thought about how to monetise our idea, but we were pretty sure that if we could build and train the model, the revenue piece would follow based on different user needs.”
The system, which is still in beta, went live for Irish consumers in August, and within the first three weeks, it fielded more than 2,600 questions and registered 200 users. Anyone can ask LegalMoov an initial question for free. Thereafter, users pay based on how much additional information they want. A novel feature is the emergency package (€24.99), which provides 48-hour access to information to cover unexpected legal situations.
Solicitors, barristers, law students and organisations such as trade unions will be a separate customer group for the company, and Frivet says the plan is to use the fees paid by professional users to keep the cost as low as possible for individuals. Other features in the pipeline include a marketplace for legal professionals and a tool to help generate and review legal documents.
So, why should someone trust LegalMoov any more than an AI chatbot?
“Our language model is legal purpose AI and we only use verified statutes and case law directly from the Irish Government’s website, and it’s updated daily,” Frivet stresses. “This compares with the data set in general AI, which is very wide and can’t tell the difference between Northern Ireland applicable law and applicable law in the Republic, for example.
“What we’ve done is very complex because of the range of questions you need to ask the model to identify jurisdiction-specific legislation. Our AI can do this because we spent nine months training it on the right material to ask the right questions.”
State support for LegalMoov is running at €90,000 so far, with co-founder investment of about €400,000 on top. The next step will be pre-seed funding, and WestBIC, which supports entrepreneurs, is shepherding the company through the application process. The system can be customised for different countries, and the long-term plan is to expand overseas.
