Exclusive: Caseway AI brings chatbot tech to Canadian legal system

In December 2023, Vancouver lawyer Chong Ke submitted a routine application for a family law case. Except two of the cases she cited didn’t actually exist. 

Ke had asked ChatGPT for help on finding examples as part of her legal brief. In response, the chatbot “hallucinated” false answers — leading to both an investigation from the Law Society of B.C. into her conduct, and financial consequences for the lawyer. The incident was one of the first reported examples of ChatGPT-generated precedent making it into a Canadian courtroom.

Ke was onto a good idea — what lawyer, after all, wouldn’t want to save time when researching cases. But she was using the wrong tool.

Around the same time as ChatGPT came into wider use, Alistair Vigier — a trained lawyer and founder of counsel-rating site Clearway Law — also recognized the efficiency of having AI parse legal decisions. Canadian courts have produced more than 2.5 million court judgements that are accessible on law database CanLII, and finding and pulling requested information can be a laborious process. But, understanding — as Ke did not — that any legal data returned by ChatGPT would be riddled with inaccuracies, he decided to build a similar tool exclusively for Canadian cases. 

The result — a product named Caseway AI — was developed in conjunction with Clearway Law CTO Andrew Hodge and UBC PhD data scientists, with legal giant Clio’s founder Rian Gauvreau acting as an advisor. The platform launches today.

“The easiest way to think of [Caseway] is as an AI chatbot that goes through millions of court decisions,” Vigier tells Vancouver Tech Journal. “We’ve seen people use ChatGPT and be slammed for it. So what we’ve done is only fed our AI with court decisions, so it doesn’t know anything beyond that. 

“ChatGPT considers what PartyBoy69 says on Reddit, what someone says in their Facebook page, or what people write in blogs,” he continues. “For [Caseway], it’s very easy. We’re not concerned about the quality, because if a judge didn't write it, our AI doesn't know — it'll just tell you, ‘I have no idea; I couldn't find any cases.’ And it also produces all of its sources, so that lawyers can actually go check on CanLII right now. That's a nice way to get around the hallucinations. Because if our AI says, ‘In this case, on page 60, this happened,’ they can go and check it.”

Disrupting the legal business

For lawyers, Caseway offers a big time-saver when researching complex cases. Of the several-million decisions listed from Canadian courts, many can run to 100 pages — or longer. Not even top lawyers have the capacity to read the cases they cite in their entirety, leading to potential challenges from opposing counsel. Using Caseway, Vigier says, can help legal professionals win more cases, or to better their solicitor work.

Doing so produces obvious benefits for a law firm. More victories lead to better reviews, happier clients, and more referrals. And while increasing efficiency might initially seem counterintuitive — lawyers, after all, make money on their billable hours, and decreasing that time can cut into the bottom line — Vigier predicts that taking steps to reduce aimless reading can help legal professionals transform their business. 

“That was the profit model for a long time, where law was created in inefficiency,” he says. “If it took you this long, you could bill out ridiculous amounts of hours. I know that the large law firms have actually been changing their practices. For the longest time, they had clients like governments and large corporations, and they could basically charge them whatever they wanted. They could send them fees for hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and it really didn't matter. And now even those kinds of organizations are saying, ‘Well, maybe we should be more efficient with our time.’”

As well as helping legal firms with their big accounts, adopting AI tools, Vigier believes, will benefit smaller clients too. Approximately 50 percent of people self-represent their cases. Vigier suggests a high proportion of those would opt to retain a lawyer, if it was affordable; as he puts it, “people think they can figure it out,” but it’s “totally not fun” to navigate the legal system without professional help. With the time-suck of case research stripped down to a single search, Caseway could help firms not only serve more clients, but offer new, affordable packages that lower the financial barrier to representation.

“I think, with time, that people will be demanding that their lawyers are using efficiency tools,” he says. “There will be a period of time when I'm confident enough [with Caseway] to go out and say, ‘Make sure your lawyers are using this. Because otherwise, if it takes them three hours to find one case, and they're charging you $300 an hour, you just paid $900 that you didn't have to pay.’ That will come in time, but it will take time.”

Help for self-representation

For those who opt not to retain a lawyer, or are of limited means, Vigier believes Caseway can still help. Self-representation, he says, can be a small risk when dealing with minor offenses like fighting a parking ticket (something the founder says he’s used Caseway for himself). But complex cases like child-custody battles could have devastating consequences for parents. Self-representing in criminal law could lead to mistakes costing jail time. Having access to a tool like Caseway can help individuals better prepare for their day in court.

The platform is launching at a price point of $49 per month for the basic version, and $99 a month for users who want the tool to analyze or create legal documents. But Vigier also hopes to offer a “near cost” tier for those that qualify for it.

“What we’re thinking of doing is turning this over for free, for self-represented people that qualify for things like legal aid, for example, or pro bono,” he says. “We'll have to figure out a way to provide it at cost, but that would be cheap — [...] just because there are charges that we incur. But I would [also] want to do a partnership with legal aid associations, because they're so dramatically underfunded.”

Legaltech on the rise in the region

Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest has become a hotbed for the legaltech sector over the past decade, and Caseway’s launch places it on a growing list of companies choosing the region as their base.

Most notably, Vancouver is home to Clio, which offers law firms cloud-based software for management tasks, including client intake, contact management, calendaring, document management, timekeeping, billing, and trust accounting. In July, the organization raised USD $900 million at a company valuation of $3 billion.

Just south of the 49th parallel, Avvo Legal has been operating in Seattle since 2006, and now provides more than 65 million annual visitors with information about attorneys and the legal process. The company was sold in 2018 to Internet Brands for an undisclosed amount, and was valued at around USD $650 million three years prior.

LawDepot — a darling of the Edmonton tech scene which provides legal document templates for Canadian, American, British, Irish, and Australian clients — boasts more than 13 million users who have created over 41 million documents, from separation agreements to wills.

The rise of legaltech, Vigier believes, is being spurred by lawyers taking an interest in the sector, leading to new investment into the industry.

“Before — and this is going back only five years — there really was no investor interest in legaltech,” he says. “Founders typically follow where the money is, and investors typically follow where the consumers are. So more consumers — and in this case, I'm talking about lawyers — are getting more comfortable using technology, and it's no longer this dirty kind of thing. There is the expectation that they're using something. 

“We still have the case where we reach out to people and they're like, ‘No, absolutely no AI. We don't even have a website, and we don't have social media. We're referrals only.’ But I think that's a generational thing. I think once those lawyers retire, which is probably going to be pretty soon, the new generation is definitely going to be heavily using [AI].”

Don’t miss out on the local stories that will make your life easier. Subscribe or become a member of Vancouver Tech Journal.