by Jay Mandal Chief Operating Officer of SAP, Codex Fellow, and Guest Lecturer at Stanford Law School
The first LLM x Law Hackathon was held at Stanford Law School on Saturday, May 20. The hallways were buzzing with 150 participants as 40 teams of lawyers, engineers and students explored the intersection between large language models and the law. This was an incredibly energizing experience.
Friendly and fearless community. We jumped right in with Vikram Grocer and Sacha Levy to submit our startup hack.
The ideas of the finalists, driven by LLM/generative artificial intelligence tools, include:
- A tool for automated contract negotiations, in which independent AI agents generating independently act as two opposing parties with a moderator to negotiate specific terms
- A 3D avatar that can verbally converse with users and answer basic legal questions
- Automated creation for lawyers of prepopulated legal complaints that draw on news, reports and social media about a recent major incident negatively impacting a populace.
- The solution is to assess the transparency of every company’s compliance to salary disclosure laws in order to ensure that applicants are fully aware of salary ranges.
- Two tools to help you with high-volume due diligence and PDFs of court documents and depositions.
- A 16-year old coder built a solution that allows individuals to immediately access relevant prior case law as well as their own past history. This helps to prevent coerced pleas of guilty.
Some takeaways from speaking with many other innovators.
- The LLM has provided innovators with a powerful tool which could lead to the long promised democratization in legal services for the vast majority who cannot afford to hire legal services themselves.
- This community is not only focused on legal, but is also looking to disrupt other industries, including financial services, labor markets, marketing and sales processes, and others.
- Since my time at Apple, I have never seen such a promising ecosystem of innovative ideas and companies across all verticals.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done. The organizers and participants are to be commended for igniting a creative flame yesterday within our AI and Legal community (and beyond), to help build a better future. This event inspired me to rethink the way my Stanford colleagues and I teach AI and law in future classes, as well as how we share our ideas with the community.
My dear friends and co-workers Dr. Megan Ma, Roland Vogl, Pierre-Loic Doulcet, and Raphael Ancellin were the organizers for this groundbreaking event, presented by CodeX, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. My longtime friend Aparna sinha was a sponsor and judge.
Here is more information about the event .