AI Revolutionises Indian Law: Three Harvard Graduates at the Helm

AI Revolutionises Indian Law: Three Harvard Graduates at the Helm

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A Trio of Innovators

Three Harvard graduates ripple waves within the Indian legal landscape after tapping into the power of Artificial Intelligence. The stellar venture is redefining the way lawyering happens, speeding up efficiency and accuracy, as well as access to legal services.

“ Jhana combines advanced search capabilities with an extensive legal database automating critical, time-intensive tasks for lawyers and expanding access to justice.” Founders

The Problem They're Solving

The Indian legal system, like others, is plagued by two major problems: productivity and access. Long research processes, review of documents through paper, and limited availability of legal expertise are the major bottlenecks in lawyers' productivity as much as they are for clients.

Press Release Note

Jhana, Pali for mental absorption and meditation, was founded by Ben Hoffner-Brodsky, Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy, and Em McGlone, who were classmates at Harvard.

“Jhana is India’s first AI paralegal. Our journey began when I was building legal access technology at World Bank DE JURE and Hemanth was working with the Gates Foundation on government procurement and contracting. We had taken sophisticated tooling for granted at the Harvard library. But, the process by which India's legacy journals digitised themselves was not led by technologists or vision, but was a compulsion of times. We were clearly behind the West in adopting and developing different kinds of legal practice and management tools. We realised there was a lot of catch up. It thus became abundantly clear to us that the primitive state of practice tools in Indian laws was an opportunity to build an AI-first legal platform that transcends access into intelligibility,” said Brodsky.

It can read an individual contract or an entire due diligence data room and tabulate well-referenced red flags and risks. It can trace judgments and statutes to map the enforceability and compliances for your deal. Or, it can replace a search engine as a primary research platform for litigation work. It can also identify precedents that are either beneficial or burdensome to an argument or issue. It can identify grounds for appeal or strategies for the hearings. It can read case documents and understand a factual matrix, from background to in-depth advisory research.

How AI is the Solution

“jhana.ai is India's first AI paralegal assistant designed specifically for the Indian legal system. At jhana, we believe that if lawyers are using better tools for research, it can improve the quality of justice everywhere,” said McGlone.

The answer of these Harvard graduates designed a cutting-edge AI platform that solves all of those pain points.

Automation of legal research

The toolbox they proposed now allows for automation of legal research by using natural language processing and machine learning. It is easy to focus on necessary information and precedents through megabytes of databases of legal documents quickly.

Provide Expert Insights:

The network can connect lawyers with a well-placed network of legal experts in which they seek specialized advice and guidance on complex matters.

Improve Accessibility

This means making access to legal services more efficient and affordable, helping to bridge the gap between lawyers and clients- especially in underserved areas.

Major Challenges and Overcoming Them

"It is always providing quotes, links and Standard Indian Legal Citations (SILC) to support its reasoning. It does not make assumptions or rely on black-box algorithms. The AI's thought process is fully transparent. Any claims made by Jhana's AI include inline source links that take users directly to the original document being referenced. Outputs also include relevant quotes and citations to allow easy verification of the AI's responses. Users can also report errors or inaccuracies through feedback buttons. This minimises hallucinations, or what users refer to as responses that are made up,” said Amanullah Qaiser, the Legal Research Lead at Jhana.

Developing an AI platform for the legal industry presents an in itself unique set of challenges. Some of the many challenges with which the Harvard graduates grapple include the following:

Data Quality: The data used to train the AI models must be extremely accurate and reliable. Thus, the team has invested in data cleaning and quality control processes to address this challenge.

Ethical Considerations: Next, legal application of AI also raises questions on ethics, such as the algorithm showing bias. The team is committed to developing AI systems that are fair, transparent, and accountable.

Regulatory Compliance: The site should meet all the legal and regulatory requirements of the jurisdiction, including data privacy. We have consulted extensively with experts in the legal sector for this purpose.

Future Prospects

“We have now grown and been hard at work, trusting the adage — may the rising tide lift all boats,” said McGlone.

The prospect of AI for the law is bright. As technology changes, we will be able to see much more significant degrees of innovative applications for AI in the practice of law. The platform itself developed by these Harvard graduates is a testimonial to the potential of AI in transforming the face of how lawyers operate.

References

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