Digital legal advice tool My AI Lawyer is looking expand voice access, allowing users to send voice notes and receive responses with transcriptions.
So says Darren Cohen, head of distribution and marketing at My AI Lawyer, in an interview with ITWeb ahead of the official launch of the tool in the local market.
Developed by legal software firm Legal Interact and mass market niche insurer Legal&Tax Services, the initial version of My AI Lawyer was deployed in March 2023, released as a service on WhatsApp and then as a full-scale legal dashboard.
The platform was launched in beta phase internally before being deployed into the base at Legal&Tax Services, stretching further over time into various partner businesses, he states.
As of 2023, it had answered over 150 000 legal questions, completed more than 9 000 AI legal advice sessions and assisted more than 30 000 users, primarily for labour, civil and family matters. The platform offers subscription plans ranging from R49 to R99 per month, with an initial free trial.
The service is currently accessible to about 70 different partner businesses, including employers, mobile networks, banks and other insurers, according to Cohen.
“We started delivering it to clients where they could get access to AI-based advice and hand over to a human being,” he explains.
“We want to promote access to justice. Our experience is that those legal issues can be resolved when advice and assistance are accessible, and where access to justice may be interpreted to mean costly litigation, access to advice can be the difference in enabling you to protect what you love and fight for what matters.”
The platform allows users to ask questions and educate themselves on their legal rights, he notes, adding that qualified human legal advisors are also available to help with a sensitive or complex matter.
“One of the other gaps that we are trying to bridge, in terms of access to justice, is around technical legal concepts. Legal terminology can be overwhelming, and it can make that information inaccessible. So, we’ve spent a lot of time curating that legalese into plain language.
“You can request that legal letters be drafted and e-mailed to you, and access contextualised advice that becomes more refined the more you engage on a particular matter. When matters are complex, you can ask My AI Lawyer to transfer you to one of the legal professionals.”
From a product development perspective, Cohen explains that My AI Lawyer started with the base of a large language model (LLM), building its systems around key infrastructure.
The platform’s tech partners are a Microsoft certified partner, so it is ISO certified, he adds. “We built on frameworks like Azure and OpenAI, and above that LLM; we’ve then curated our own corpus of legal information. At the very heart of it, we’ve developed a companion.
“Outside of that central core of being a companion, we’ve curated South African law, and we continue to do that daily. We’ve ingested South African legislation, precedent, and we curate in the region of 1 000 to 2 000 questions and answers weekly that we review, that have been asked on the platform and placing it back in, reviewing how the AI has answered, making sure that we can tweak and improve that on a regular basis.”
Cohen highlights that unlike generic AI tools, My AI Lawyer is specifically trained on South African law by South African lawyers and constantly updated for the latest developments.
The platform is also a closed system and has guardrails to contextualise and provide answers that align with the South African legal system. “My AI Lawyer handles all personal information in accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act.”
In terms of future developments, Cohen states the dream is that if a user is pulled over at a roadblock, or has an inspector arrive at their home, and they want to understand their legal rights, they could speak to My AI Lawyer.
“We’ve done some beta testing around that…whether that was a phone call, or you were accessing a web platform, or whatever it may be, but where you are having a two-way conversation with My AI Lawyer could be a very interesting development into the future.”
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