UK top 40 law firm Travers Smith has given the green light for respected legal technology director Shawn Curran and a team of four to form an independent company that will now be able to take their proprietary AI products to market, free from the constraints of a law firm.
The unprecedented move will see Curran and his team move to Workspace on Phipp street in Shoreditch, London. Under the new arrangements, which are being announced externally today (22 May) Travers will be a majority shareholder in Jylo, although the new company has free rein to grow, including raising further capital, and it will operate completely independently. The Jylo team constitutes AI manager Sam Lansley, who is now chief technology officer; project manager Russell Harding, who is VP of consulting; software engineer Jake Good, who moves across as a software engineer; and software engineer Zak Jama, who is now a senior software engineer.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Travers’ chief technology officer Oliver Bethell said that the AI team’s journey began in May last year, when the Travers partnership and board recognised that AI was going to have a major impact and took the decision to build products internally to respond to this.
The AI team built open source chatbot YCNBot, which quickly became copied as an enterprise chatbot, and then nine months ago it launched Analyse, which allows you to ask questions of large volumes of unstructured data, using large language models at scale.
Bethell said: “We’ve had several really interesting use cases both internally and with clients and Shawn has been part of that and just generally advancing our AI strategy. Shawn has been speaking to lots of firms and clients and connections about our products and the question is always, ‘can we buy this technology?’
“We recognise the opportunity for Analyse to extend well beyond Travers Smith and so the partnership, working with the board, has taken the view that we can return even more value to Travers Smith if we spin out that AI capability into its own company.”
The Jylo product – which combines YCNBot and Analyse – is built and Bethell said: “I’d say it’s version 0.9, nearly at 1.0. It’s really impressive. What the team has built combines the best of the chat and Analyse products as well as some really interesting new features and some really unique ones as well.”
While on one level this is a loss of internal talent for Travers, Bethell says that the Travers board recognised this as a great opportunity and are fully supportive of the move.
Asked if the team will need to grow, Curran says that in the early days he expects there will be high level of consultancy required in order to help organisations – not limited to the legal sector – to create advanced and complex prompts. He said: “Creating really good and advanced prompts requires a certain skillset that we know doesn’t exist within a lot of our customers, so the consulting area is an area that naturally you could see need to grow as we take on more customers, but from an engineering perspective, we’ve got real strength and depth in terms of infrastructure, machine learning operations and software engineering.”
He adds: “It’s really important in the early days of the business to support customers to write really good prompts because this is nascent and nobody has the skills to understand what to do. But the long tail is that we build prompt templates that allow for two, three, four or five years of value without having to be changed.”
In terms of the competitive landscape, Curran says that he believes there is a significant advantage for new entrants coming to market and building generative AI products from a blank slate, rather than trying to effectively shoe horn gen AI into existing products, commenting: “What we have built creates unique interfaces that allow for a bunch of different use cases to be supported and we have not had a use case in our organisation that Analyse hasn’t been able to support.”
YCNBot will remain available as an open source product and Curran says: “We’ll continue to support people who want to do that because we’re going to be an engineering led tech business, but we also want to be able to sell to people who don’t have engineers, because it does take a lot of knowledge, and it’s difficult to get open source models live on your own infrastructure and build complex prompts, so there is definitely a market for that.”
Jylo’s first customer will be Travers Smith and it is hoped that it will expand out rapidly from there.