The Stack Overflow Podcast

Legal advice from an AI is illegal

Dec 17, 2024
Mark Dobel, CEO of Alexi, discusses how AI can revolutionize the legal industry by streamlining litigation workflows and enhancing legal research. He emphasizes the importance of AI in sifting through immense case law to support lawyers more effectively. The conversation tackles the challenges of integrating AI responsibly, noting that it cannot offer legal advice without proper licensing. Dobel also addresses the critical need for legal systems to evolve alongside these technologies to prevent obsolescence in the field.
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ANECDOTE

Bootstrapping Alexi

  • Mark Dobel bootstrapped Alexi with $50,000, coding the entire product himself using Ruby on Rails.
  • Initially focused on Canadian customers, which proved to be a mistake, later expanding to the US.
INSIGHT

Early Product

  • Alexi's initial product was a RAG implementation using extractive summarization to present legal research.
  • This approach summarized content from retrieved links, offering a more user-friendly experience than a list of links.
INSIGHT

Retrieval Model Shift

  • Initially, Alexi focused on improving retrieval models for legal research using Siamese encoders.
  • They later shifted to an agentic approach, using LLMs to validate retrieved documents, improving efficiency.
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