Meet our Guest with Tom Dreyfus
Image: Portrait of Tom Dreyfus.
At GWA we're passionate about providing user-friendly solutions to our creative clients. Which is why we're thrilled to be working with Josef to create legal chatbots as part of our services. What on earth is a legal chatbot and why is it relevant to me, you might ask? For this edition of Meet our Guest, we had a chat with Tom Dreyfus, CEO and Co-Founder of Josef, to find out.
Tom leads the company strategy and global relationships with customers and technology partners. He has worked as a solicitor, served as an associate at the High Court of Australia and is the Vice President of the Australian Legal Technology Association. Tom has held board and leadership roles in not-for-profit organisations and is a regular speaker at global legal industry events.
Welcome Tom. Tell us about how it all began - Josef - where did the idea of a legal chatbot come from?
The idea for Josef was born out of work that we were doing with legal assistance organisations to help them deliver more legal help, more efficiently to more people. We started by building specific automation tools for them that would solve a particular problem – like a tool that could help renters write to their landlords to demand urgent repairs.
We quickly realised that to scale the impact that these tools could have on the accessibility of legal services, we needed to build a platform that would make it easy for legal subject-matter experts to build their own. Just like Guest Work Agency is doing!
Most legal technology is focused on internal efficiencies, rather than service delivery and improving client outcomes. We believe these things go hand in hand. Not only can you scale legal services with automation, but you can also enable legal professionals to spend more time on the things that matter. Our mission is to make legal services more accessible to everyone, and we’re grateful that we get to do this every day. By creating technology that people want to use, we empower legal professionals to scale their services and to help meet the unmet demand for justice.
And if you’re wondering (like most people do!) “why ‘Josef’?”, our company takes its name from the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s novel ‘The Trial’: Josef K. In the story, Josef K is arrested for an unknown crime and prosecuted by a mysterious authority. Despite his apparent innocence, he finds himself powerless and undone by a bureaucratic and opaque legal system.
The story doesn’t end happily, but it does help us to think about hard questions: who is entitled to justice in a society? What is the role of legal professionals in either helping or hindering those in need?
Josef started at a time where the concept of ‘legal design’ - the application of human centred design to the law - started to gain traction. Was this a coincidence or something more?
Definitely not a coincidence! Good design goes hand in hand with good technology.
Like Josef, legal designers aim to enhance the legal experience for both clients and the people doing the work. Legal technology is one way to facilitate the implementation of legal design principles by providing tools and platforms to create visually appealing and user-friendly legal products.
We have worked in partnership with a few legal designers who have helped Josef to become the platform that it is today. We have also incorporated legal design into the way that our users engage with the platform, including a learning module called the Designer and Builder Program that we offer to our builders.
What exactly is a legal chatbot, how does it work?
This is a harder question than you might think! There are two key types of legal chatbots – “rules-based” and “AI-powered”. Josef offers both.
A “rules-based” chatbot evaluates user input, matches it with predefined rules, and delivers an appropriate response or performs a specific action accordingly. Whereas an “AI-powered” chatbot simulates a human conversation to provide automated legal assistance based on the data and algorithms it has been trained on.
But that’s just how the technology works. What really matters is not the technology that’s being used, but the tasks the chatbot can perform and how effective it is at resolving a client’s problem. These problems range from requests for legal assistance, to making important legal decisions, to drafting complex legal documents.
When built in a user-centric way, the benefits of legal chatbots are immense. Think 24/7 availability, immediate responses, cost-effective legal assistance, and the ability to handle a high volume of inquiries. But it remains important to remember that legal chatbots have limitations and can’t (yet?!) replace the expertise and personalised advice of human lawyers.
Can you give us some examples of how legal chatbots have been used to provide greater access to justice?
Josef works with innovative legal assistance organisations around the world, helping them to deliver greater access to legal help for people who need it most.
In Australia, we work with organisations like the Consumer Action Law Centre, which has built tools to provide automated guidance and advice about consumers’ financial rights in connection with junk insurance. And the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre, which uses Josef to help 1000s of help-seekers each year to understand where to find the resources and assistance they need.
In the US, we have seen legal chatbots built on Josef to assist victims of domestic violence to navigate the legal system, and others to help people to access their unemployment benefits.
The unifying feature of all these tools is transforming complex concepts and content into accessible and engaging user experiences, featuring concise breakdowns of legal requirements, visual aids, and excerpts to help users navigate an otherwise complicated process.
Image: Josef Q in action, answering a question about a parental leave policy.
You’ve recently launched Josef Q, an ‘AI Powered Policy and Regulation Q&A Tool’ - how is AI used to power this tool? What data and model(s) is Josef Q trained on?
Josef Q is a new product that we recently released to turn policies and regulations into simple digital Q&A tools.
The platform enables you to upload a suite of policies or a complex regulation and then train a customisable AI to answer FAQs about that content. Josef Q transforms static policies and processes into interactive Q&A tools that anyone can understand and puts them at the fingertips of the entire organisation. It offers point-in-time intervention that delivers information in the way that people need it.
We have partnered with OpenAI to leverage their large language models for content analysis and answer-generation. But we also make “human-in-the-loop” training and moderation a core part of the process to ensure the highest levels of accuracy. We’ve also implemented several guardrails that avoid the pitfalls of products like ChatGPT that are prone to “hallucinations”.
This is AI tailored to the specific needs of policy and compliance managers who want to solve the all-too-common experience of spending too much of their day answering the same questions over and over.
In some ways the legal industry is like the art industry, in that it is heavily influenced by age-old customs and traditions. Is the legal industry embracing new technology solutions? Why/Why Not?
The legal industry is certainly based on tradition! One of the foundations of legal work is a “precedent”. Judges rely on past decisions to make new decisions, and lawyers use precedent documents as a base for their drafting. So much of the legal industry is built on what has come before.
But that doesn’t mean things aren’t changing, and fast! Legal technology offers new opportunities to deliver more value in better ways. And so, we see the legal industry gradually embracing new technology, although the pace of adoption varies across different jurisdictions and segments of the industry. For those of us passionate about technology’s role in the practise of law, I think we’re excited about its potential to bridge the access to justice gap and make something difficult and opaque for clients easier and clearer.
Progress is slow, but the latest hype-wave driven by generative AI is going to speed things up! As the saying now goes, technology is not going to replace lawyers, but lawyers who use technology will replace those who don’t.
We’re excited to get stuck into building legal chatbots for our creative clients - do you have any suggestions for a legal chatbot that might be useful for an art-oriented business?
Absolutely! Here are just some that come to mind. Bots that can (1) provide information and guidance on copyright laws specific to the art industry; (2) assist artists and art businesses with generating common agreements, like commission contracts, consignment agreements and licensing agreements; (3) help artists and art businesses identify potential IP infringement cases; (4) answer frequently asked legal questions about topics like artist rights, fair use, art gallery agreements, art commissions, art festivals, and more.
The sky’s the limit!
As part of our services at Guest Work Agency we are designing and building user-centric legal chatbots using Josef. If you are an art-orientated business interested in integrating a legal chatbot, please contact us at info@guestworkagency.art.