Hacking toward legal innovation

Undeterred by a massive snowstorm, more than 100 students, lawyers and community members showed up to the Legal AI Hackathon recently in downtown Toronto.

The event, co-hosted by Queen’s University Conflict Analytics Lab (CAL) and Stanford University’s Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX), brought people together to experiment with OpenJustice, the large language model developed by CAL.

Participants had six hours to create a program for solving an access to justice issue, using the CBA’s class action database, or a product involving contract negotiations.

Legal hackathons are designed to bring people from different backgrounds, particularly those in the tech and design fields, into the legal space to develop new ideas and experiment with technology. They are an effective way to explore ideas quickly and foster collaboration in an industry where innovation can take years.  

The first-place prize went to the team Ace Attorney, led by Colin Lachance, innovator-in-residence at the Ontario Bar Association (OBA). The team created an intake program to help pro bono organizations gather information about employment issues from potential clients.  

The second-place team, led by Monika Koestner and Richard Trus, created an AI system that used aggregated data from the CBA’s class action database to identify trends to help clients and law firms determine the best course of action to move forward with a class action lawsuit. The winning team received a $2,000 prize sponsored by Osler and a one-year subscription to Spellbook, an AI contracts tool.

The CBA’s database is a free tool for lawyers and the public. It contains 41,000 cases from across Canada dating back to 2007. Several jurisdictions, including Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and the Federal Court, have practice directives that automatically send class action documents to the CBA.

Koestner and Trus knew they wanted to work with the database. Last year, they used it to file a class action lawsuit against Fanshawe College, alleging the school’s paralegal program failed to meet regulatory standards as a competent program. Both had attended the paralegal program from September 2022 until January 2023.

“The goal of our work is social change,” says Trus.

“Class actions are used to push for the truth and justice. The CBA database has excellent data, and we think there’s a way to enhance it.”

The database provides not only class action rulings but also statements of actions, class certification rulings and other important information that can be used to determine what class actions would be most successful in court.

With help from CBA staff attending the hackathon, Koestner and Trus narrowed down their ideas to a proposal to aggregate the data to show trends of which type of cases are getting certified. They were surprised to finish in second place and want to put the $1,000 prize towards the cost of attending the next major legal hackathon at Stanford in April. They’re hoping a law firm can sponsor their trip.

“This was so much fun. Everyone was so supportive in showing us how to produce a product in a short time,” says Koestner.

“We want to make things easier for people looking to start a class action. We’re going to keep working on this idea and take it to the next hackathon.”

Participants met virtually through a Discord channel just a few days before the event. Lachance introduced himself and caught the attention of two computer science majors and an LLM student who had attended one of his OBA virtual events. The team began working on an idea to create a legal educational game but decided the idea didn’t fit into the hackathon criteria.

Instead, they focused on the needs of someone looking for a lawyer and used the tech infrastructure they had built for the game. Their chatbot collects information from the user about their problem and then maps out relevant facts and cases a lawyer can use when meeting the potential client for the first time. Lachance hopes to work with a pro bono organization on the project in the future.

“Legal hackathons can open your eyes to how quickly you can create something with incredible value,” he says.

“Large law firms should be doing them internally. There’s a unique energy when doing a hackathon with people you don’t usually work with. It helps in thinking about innovation and development.”