The ChatGPT chatbot continues to show its possibilities day after day. What if I could play lawyer? In France, some entrepreneurs wanted to put their skills to the test, each with the same goal: to make the law more accessible to everyone.
Steve Morin, a French former Google employee, used the software to create LegiGPT, a chatbot capable of answering legal questions from Internet users. Built on the GPT-3.5 version, the robot was trained with some 148,000 French legal texts, including all the codes of justice.
The tool was immediately hugely successful. If the conversational robot already demonstrates amazing capabilities with GPT-3.5, “it has nothing to do with the GPT-4 version,” Steeve Morin explains to Tech&Co. “I showed the result to the lawyers who were honestly amazed.”
Make the law accessible
Steeve Morin insists on the relevance of LegiGPT to deal with on a case-by-case basis, as close as possible to the applicant. “Language models are particularly good at processing information like laws. In fact, laws are instructions, a kind of code for humans. It applies very well to artificial intelligence.”
The same observation for Ordalie, the software created by Léa Fleury, a lawyer by training, and Baudouin Arbarétier, two entrepreneurs who have also embarked on the career. “Our initial conviction was based on the adage ‘no one should ignore the law’. Except that today, many citizens are not aware of everything: the law is disparate and sometimes unintelligible,” says Léa Fleury.
Ordalie co-founders took the initiative to go beyond the ChatGPT model. “We started from the base of GPT-3.5, which serves as a language model, but then we developed our own artificial intelligence models. We created a vector base that allows us to offer the most relevant and complete answers possible. our own model also gives us added value”, explains Léa Fleury.
A model that seems convincing, since since the launch on May 1, more than 11,000 requests have been made to Ordalie, which also has more than 17,000 visits.
Ordalie is aimed in particular at professionals (lawyers or not), its founders have taken care to integrate, for example, in addition to the Labor Code, all the texts of jurisprudence and company collective agreements. “If we had only integrated the Labor Code, Ordalie would only give half the answer, so it was essential.”
In addition to processing the query in a personalized way for the person in question, the software is capable of indicating to the applicant certain legal texts that they would not have thought of.
Here, Tech&Co asked the same question to the two chatbots Ordalie and LegitGPT: “I am a journalist and a media outlet has completely copied an article I wrote myself, without quoting myself. What can I do?”
Although the two chatbots refer to the Intellectual Property Code, they do not use the same articles. We note a more synthetic and concise response from Ordalie. Another difference, Ordalie specifies in an insert the precise legal texts used in the response. An “essential” criterion for Léa Fleury, because in law “it is essential to give a well-founded answer.”
Write a letter, search for information
Any citizen can also ask the AI for help to write an official letter. “Submitting a complaint, filing an appeal, it can really help,” explains Steeve Morin.
The idea is shared in Ordalie: “First we target, in addition to individuals, small and medium-sized companies that do not necessarily have the means to use a lawyer to ask simple legal questions.”
The funding challenge
On the financing side, the two projects came out of the pocket of the entrepreneurs. “We had to limit requests to 20 messages per month for the time being, to avoid abuse and reduce costs. But once we have found funding and therefore stability, the goal is to make it unlimited”, explains Léa Fleury.
The same goes for Steve Morin, whose software is only publicly accessible in its GPT-3.5 version. “I pay for everything out of my own pocket,” he explains. In question, the particularly high costs of using the top version, GPT-4, which is, however, according to him, “much more impressive in every sense of the term.”
On Twitter and privately, Internet users are enthusiastic: “Some have told me ‘I will pay to have access to a paid version'”, explains the developer. “We’ll see what happens”. Ordalie was also very well received “both by individuals and professionals”.
Despite everything, some legal professionals express fears, that of the obsolescence of human professions, which crystallized in all of them by artificial intelligence.
“An Unmanned Car”
For the teacher Xavier Dulin, a lawyer specializing in labor law, if the metamorphosis of the profession is obvious, the threat is less so. “These tools are going to have a clear impact on our work. This can save time, facilitate, go from writing to thinking. But the software does not strategize, it does not take responsibility, it does not have the necessary empathy.” He also comments that the issues of sources and reliability will have to be analyzed if these tools become widespread.
The attorney admits to being impressed by the responses he got using the two software programs. “It’s like going from a stagecoach to a car.” Despite everything, he compares them to “a car without a driver: at the end of the procedure we are reassured that a human being can supervise everything”, he abounds. Especially since, for the moment, these new tools lack legislation, according to Maître Dulin.
At Ordalie as at LegiGPT, we draw the same conclusions: if artificial intelligence demonstrates sometimes impressive abilities, it “will never replace a lawyer”.
“Being a lawyer is a profession of knowledge, but above all of experience”, says Léa Fleury. “Our desire is to provide support, optimize research time, but never replace the legal professions.”
Source: BFM TV
