Episode 57 of the Legal Tech StartUp Focus Podcast -- An interview with Tanguy Chau, co-founder & CEO of Paxton and Michael Ulin, co-founder and CTO of Paxton

Mar 14, 2024

Engineer and VC Tanguy Chau and AI expert Michael Ulin discuss Paxton, an award-winning legal tech startup. They focus on developing tailored legal language models for research, drafting, and document analysis. Tips include early product release, customer feedback, and innovation in the legal industry.

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Insights and Gratitude in LegalTech Startup Journey

01:54 • 4min

Unveiling Paxton: Revolutionizing Legal AI Technology

06:06 • 25min

Integration of AI in the Legal Industry and Startup Success Strategies

31:12 • 2min

Tips for Startup Success: Ship Early, Gather Feedback, Customer-Centric Approach

33:30 • 5min

Tanguy's and Mike's Respective Backgrounds and Path into Legal Tech:
Tanguy is an engineer with advanced degrees (including an MBA) from MIT and experience in venture capital, notably early-stage investing in legal tech startups (one of such startups being Ironclad)
Mike has a background that includes working at the Federal Reserve, McKinsey, and co-founding a company that applied AI in the insurance space. Mike’s experience with AI and legal/regulatory challenges contributed to starting Paxton.
Paxton's Recent Award: Celebrated being one of the winners at the 2024 ABA Tech Show Startup Alley
Paxton's Technology and Approach:
Focuses on developing industry-specific, application-specific, and firm-specific legal language models for greater accuracy, response speed, and security.
The data for model training includes public domain legal documents, emphasizing legal-specific training over general-purpose models.
Paxton enables customization for firms by allowing connections to internal knowledge sources without training the model on client-specific data unless requested.
Applications of Paxton:

Legal Research: Provides access to laws, regulations, and court rulings across all states and federal levels.
Document Drafting: Uses a vast corpus of legal documents to assist in drafting accurate first drafts of legal documents.
Document Analysis: Offers document analysis and Q&A capabilities for large volumes of documents, ensuring data privacy and governance for firms.

Use Case for Training Young Lawyers: Paxton aids in training younger lawyers by allowing them to ask questions and practice without fear of judgment, enhancing their learning and confidence.
Future Roadmap: Paxton plans to develop more advanced language models, connect to more data sources, and execute multi-step workflows for synthesized answers from various data sources.
Advice for Legal Tech Startups: Tanguy and Mike emphasize the importance of being customer-centric, seeking feedback, and iterating based on user input to improve and refine the product.