Dentons and Bird & Bird are joining a group of Swiss organisations, including the University of Zurich, to build JuriAIindex, a new benchmarking system to assess the effectiveness of AI models in different legal practice areas. This week Dentons also invested in Europe’s ‘first sovereign legal AI’ Noxtua – see here.
The research will commence in 2025, and JuriAIindex is expected to be released to the public in 2026.
The move is part of a wider project that will see Logol, a cloud-native AI solutions provider, the Center for Legal Data Science of University of Zurich, the DIRPOLIS Institute of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Advant Beiten, Bird & Bird, Dentons, Kellerhals Carrard, and MLL Legal, together launch a new organisation called JuriAIring.
JuriAIring will operate as an international non-profit research initiative dedicated to AI applications in the legal sector. Different members of the new project will offer their skills.
For example, Logol will develop the benchmarking technology, design the methodology, and identify and deploy leading AI models available on the market. While the scientific partners – the Center for Legal Data Science of University of Zurich and the DIRPOLIS Institute of Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies – will analyze and validate the methodology and output, they explained.
Meanwhile to ‘ensure the highest level of expertise, Logol has decided to limit participation to only five prestigious law firms, selected for their leadership in legal innovation: Advant Beiten, Bird & Bird, Dentons, Kellerhals Carrard, and MLL Legal’
Each law firm will contribute various use case descriptions for different legal practices and areas of legislation, which can be used to test the legal AI. They will then provide feedback on the responses generated by the AI tools. These will in turn, be integrated into the benchmarking algorithm, they said.
Marco Farina, CEO and Founder, Logol, commented: ‘JuriAIring is a unique global initiative of excellence, born from our conviction that in today’s disruptive AI era, bridging research, technology, and business is essential. With the JuriAIindex as our first milestone, we aim to set a global benchmark for AI’s impact on the legal sector.’
‘I sincerely thank all our partners for their trust and commitment. Our first joint effort will be the development of the JuriAIIndex — the world’s first index designed to measure the impact of different AI models on the various practice areas within a law firm. Bringing together such esteemed figures from the legal and academic world is a testament to the strength of the project and the credibility Logol has built in both the legal and AI domains. I am sincerely grateful to all our scientific and technical partners for their trust.’
Is this a big deal?
Well, it’s interesting to see Dentons announce their involvement in two high-profile AI projects in Europe in one week. Also, it’s a signal that although we see a lot of action on genAI in the US and UK, that Europe is still in the game and launching projects and supporting the growth of new companies and ideas. It’s also worth mentioning that DeepJudge – the most recommended legal AI company in the recent Skills.law survey – is also based in Switzerland.
On the accuracy side of things, that’s going to be helpful. And it will be interesting to see how a European project engages with this subject, given that many of the foundation models out there, e.g. via OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google – are all based in the US and the training data they use is often heavily US-weighted as well.
Just goes to show, Europe has plenty of innovative energy and especially in the legal AI sector. Congrats to all on launching this. Good to see Bird & Bird and Dentons getting really engaged with genAI also.