LawtechUK, the government-backed initiative within Tech Nation to help transform the UK legal sector through technology, on 8 December announced the five applicants selected to join the first group of participants of the Lawtech Sandbox R&D initiative.
The cohort joining the Lawtech Sandbox Pilot are:
Amplified GlobalAmplifi helps customers engage with and assess lengthy, technical legal information by presenting information in a way that fits a customer’s needs and enables their understanding. They achieve this by using natural language processing to identify common elements of legal documents and use machine learning to assess the degree of likely comprehension, involving a cognitive risk score.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will support Amplifi to get answers to its emerging legal, regulatory and ethical questions and help source datasets of technical or complex customer-facing legal documents to enable them to develop, test and further calibrate their approach.
ClausePeter Hunn, founder of Clause and the Accord Project, will, we are told, “demonstrate the practical applicability of electronic document technologies that can act as a foundation for business and future development.”
Legal documents are typically formed of unstructured text, which makes it difficult to analyse and use the data they contain. This causes inefficiencies, costs and revenue issues for organisations. The sandbox project has the potential to demonstrate the future for commercial documents, legislation, and digital assets in industry, as highlighted in the Lawtech Delivery Panel’s Legal Statement on Smart Contracts and Cryptoassets.
According to Tech Nation, the Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will support in building out the beginnings of an open-source library, working with its network partners on identifying different use cases for this technology, as well as facilitating engagement with public bodies and industry.
ClauseMatchClauseMatch looks to transform regulation into digital, machine-readable form with a smart documentcollaboration platform, making it easier for businesses to automate and manage their compliance and to keep up with regulations.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will connect ClauseMatch to regulators through the Regulatory Response Unit, to explore and progress digitisation of the regulatory framework, as well as facilitating access to materials such as impact assessments and risk taxonomies, to further develop their AI.
Deep Tech Dispute Resolution LabThe Deep Tech Dispute Resolution Lab is developing a dispute and risk avoidance tool based on advanced machine learning techniques. The tool sorts and analyses a range of data within organisations to automatically detect early warning signs of an emerging dispute or issue with customers, suppliers and/or others.
Through its network, the Lawtech Sandbox will support the Deep Tech Dispute Resolution Lab to work with in-house teams and secure access to organisational data to further test and train their product, and develop a commercialisation plan.
Legal UtopiaLegal Utopia makes legal services affordable and accessible, particularly focused on the SME market, by providing recommendations and information on legal services via an intelligent legal diagnostic process that can identify and assess a wide range of legal problems. They aim to make it easier for small businesses to review and understand a range of common legal documents instantly and without legalese.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot will help Legal Utopia get expert advice and data input, to realise its wider data-driven development objectives, whilst obtaining multi-regulator input to support new services and tools.
The five Lawtech Sandbox Pilot projects were chosen through a selection process with the Lawtech Sandbox Steering Board, from 65 applications received.
The pilot participants will have access to a number of tailored tools and services. This includes: access to regulators for advice, support and assurance to help navigate regulations and governance issues; connections to LawtechUK’s legal, business and public body network, to help drive commercial opportunities and collaboration; advice from applied ethics experts in the design and development of lawtech products; and access to legal data to by matchmaking with data sources, with dataset needs further factored into later phases of the Lawtech Sandbox development.
Jenifer Swallow LawtechUK Director at Tech Nation, comments:
The Lawtech Sandbox is designed to accelerate digital transformation of the legal sector by providing targeted support to those who are building game-changing lawtech, working alongside them to help raise the bar for business and society. Access to data, cross-sector regulator engagement, and timely input from decision-makers represent shared barriers to growth, all of which we address through the Lawtech Sandbox.