Justice tech startup descrybe.ai has announced the completion of a year-long effort to summarise and make searchable all available state supreme and appellate judicial opinions from US state courts.
Co-founder Kara Peterson says the company is now poised to disrupt the legal research market by making more than 2.5 million judicial opinions from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia accessible via a free search engine that anyone can access, use, and understand.
descrybe.ai uses generative AI and says that the system is not searching the internet and doesn’t know anything other than the cases it has summarised, so can’t conflate cases or hallucinate answers. However, the summaries have not been human verified and are said to be for reference and to point people in the right direction. In its FAQs, descrybe.ai warns against assuming the summaries accuracy without verifying them against the original judicial opinions.
“This is a major milestone for legal research and for access to justice,” said Peterson. “Not only does our tool present an alternative to cost-prohibitive traditional search methods, but our unique approach also lowers barriers to the law because of the way the tool is built.”
descrybe.ai lets users search case law using conversational English, which allows them to find relevant opinions without having to match exact words. We’re told that people unfamiliar with legal terms can easily use the tool, as can legal professionals looking for more accessible ways to search relevant legal decisions.
“With traditional term-based or Boolean search methods, the inputs need to be precise,” said software engineer Richard DiBona, descrybe.ai co-founder and technology lead. “With our solution, people can put in terms they know and still find useful case law.” DiBona and Peterson are a husband and wife team who do not have a legal background but describe themselves as sharing an interest in technology, the law, and the democratisation of information.
descrybe.ai is currently summarising federal district and appellate court opinions and says there will be new features rolling out in the first half of 2024.
“While a single solution like descrybe.ai will not solve the access to justice crisis,” said Peterson, “it is imperative that the legal tech innovators of today disrupt the very systems that continue to enable the systemic justice gap in the United States.”
Take a look here and let us know what you think: https://descrybe.ai/search