Legora To Launch Ontology + AI Native Citator

Legora is ramping up its legal research capabilities by offering ‘a full ontology of law and an AI-native citator’. The move follows deals with Qura and Wexler. The ontology is currently in limited beta and will be generally available in Q4.

They explained: ‘Legora is building a full ontology of the law and an AI-native citator. Legora does this with proprietary technology from its acquisitions of Qura and Wexler, compressing corpora of thousands to hundreds of millions of documents into structured data that an agent actually can use to provide reliable output.’

Or as they added: ‘Without a mapped structure of how legal authorities rank and relate, AI can’t fully understand every legal proposition and how it fits into the law as a whole.’

But, why not just use curated data from one of the main legal publishing giants?

On which point they noted: ‘Where Legora can partner with publishers, it does. Where a partnership is not on offer, it goes to the source directly, through manual requests, physical scanning, or whatever else the jurisdiction requires.’

Thus, to build its AI-native citator, Legora has ‘assembled a team of attorney-editors who spent decades building publishers’ navigation tools by hand. They define the standard, adjudicate the hard cases, and run ongoing quality control’, they said.  

‘The citator is enabled by building a full AI-native ontology of law that captures the relationships between sources, what each legal proposition means, the hierarchy of authority, temporal validity, and more,’ they added.

Arvid Winterfeldt, who leads Legal Research at Legora and was co-founder and CEO of Qura, commented: ‘We have catalogued more than 50 distinct ways AI fails at legal research.

‘AI cites a rule and misses the amendment that changed it. It quotes a dissent as the holding. It puts a non-binding agency decision on a par with a Supreme Court case. A passage can look perfectly relevant in isolation and have been made obsolete by a later case.’

Last word goes to Melanie Brown, Head of Legal Data, Legora: ‘The frustration I hear most from clients is that they cannot access the data they already pay publishers for in the AI platforms they want to work in.’

‘It’s a different problem in every country. In the US, access to citable case law is constrained by the companies that own the official reports and won’t sell a digital feed.

‘In Germany, the challenges are digitization and anonymization. But there is always a way, and we’re doing whatever it takes to bring together every data type in over 100 countries around the world. We are bringing all the world’s legal data into Legora.’

Is this a big deal?

Well, it’s good to see Legora being so candid about the challenges of getting legal research right. And, as they say, this ontology and citator are going to be most useful when the data giants aren’t able to provide what a lawyer is looking for while working within Legora.

Fundamentally what this does is allow lawyers to work on legal research matters without leaving the Legora context.

Is this a threat to the data giants? AL would say it’s more about making what they offer perform better inside Legora, along with tapping more accurately many other legal data sources that are perhaps more open-source, but are less well curated.

More about Legora here.

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