Starting a law firm from scratch is no easy feat. But prominent Australian data scientist and entrepreneur Jeremy Howard is doing just that, and more, launching a new firm with artificial intelligence at its core targeted at startup customers.
With a team of three lawyers, the new firm Virgil, launched last Friday. Named after the Aeneid poet, Virgil will actively experiment with AI, building it into the practice “from the ground up”. Howard’s AI research and development lab Answer.AI has backing from Google AI leads and now he hopes Virgil will become the “world’s most successful law company”.
“Our view of the size of the transformation potential is very high. It’s very bold. It’s 10x efficiency improvement. That means literally changing how the law is practised”, Howard told Capital Brief in an interview.
“Lawyers aren’t going to get the big benefits just by buying some off the shelf software. You actually need to have it totally integrated into the practice itself from the ground up. So we have our AI researchers talking to our lawyers every day, building stuff together, testing it out the next day, reworking it based on their actual feedback,” Howard said.