CompetitionAI is a legal tech startup that was launched in November 2023 as ‘ChatGPT for competition lawyers’. It’s the brainchild of Daniel Schwarz, a competition lawyer at Clifford Chance, along with AI software engineers Jonathan Halpern and Andrew Davidson.
When a lawyer asks a question it uses AI to search through thousands of pages of competition authority guidance to identify the relevant information, generates an answer only using information in the guidance and then shows the user the source so they can quickly verify the answer. Since then it’s received more than 600 sign ups from users from more than 100 law firms and 60 corporates.
It also now includes competition law guidance for 10 jurisdictions. This follows the addition of Canada, Ireland, India, South Africa, Turkey and Nigeria to its existing database of the UK, EU, USA and Australia.
Artificial Lawyer asked Schwarz to tell us some more.
– How did this start?
After 10 years working as a competition lawyer at Clifford Chance in London and the IMF in Washington DC, I became obsessed with AI when I realised we could use it to build software to turbocharge competition lawyers. I teamed up with two brilliant AI software engineers, Jonathan Halpern and Andrew Davidson, and CompetitionAI was born. We launched in November 2023 and within the first 24 hours we had more than 250 sign ups.
– What tech does it use?
When a user asks a question, it searches through thousands of pages of guidance to identify the relevant information in seconds. We’ve therefore developed a sophisticated multi-stage software architecture to ensure that we identify the correct parts of the guidance. We’ve built the world’s first AI agent designed specifically for competition law research. We’re currently using the GPT4o model which is superb, but we’ve repeatedly updated the model to ensure that we’re using the most advanced AI models available.
– Were is the data from?
Our focus has been regulator guidance, cases and decisions, however in the US we also use a textbook. We are also generating proprietary content, but that’s not currently available yet.
– Where is this heading?
We’ve got a laser focus on the needs of competition lawyers based on my 10 years’ experience in this area and we’re building a platform that reflects that. We’re also fundraising at the moment to expand our team to keep up with the massive demand we’re seeing.
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So there you go. Good luck to Schwarz and team. The message is: have genAI – will put it to use in the legal world, and that includes competition law.