AI legal assistant (YC S23)

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Designed the MVP for an AI-based legal assistant (B2B) for Atla. Helped founders strategise with clarity.

0 -> 1 Projects
Web app
Design Strategy
B2B

Contribution

atla uses AI safety techniques to make sense of the dense legal language, serving as a reliable ally in high-stakes legal decision-making. atla searches through millions of legal docs, then uses machine learning to extract key information from each source. This process-based reasoning leads to reliable answers. I worked with the founders to refine their vision into an actionable, iterative product roadmap. Interviewing real users and doing usability testing helped us leapfrog with the iterations. I was able to come up with solutions that'd solve users' problems while keeping the MVP scope small.
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Lawyers can start searching like Google or jump into their autosaved past searches
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The Summary screen presents the AI-generated answer to the legal question and relevant sources.

Context

The current users, the legal teams at Volkswagen and N26, ask a legal question, and the AI assistant generates a reliable answer alongside the legal sources, documents and court decisions. The tool also lets them ask follow-up questions, and dig deeper to find the 'whole' answer.
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The generated summary is always linked to the sources on the right. On hover, the user can copy, view the sources and rate.
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A context menu is available when the user selects a part of the text

Dig Deeper

On interviewing the lawyers, the biggest hurdle in adopting the software came to light. Lawyers needed to reduce liability, and a one-shot AI-generated summary did not cut it for them. They needed a way to go deeper into their research and find answers from different angles. After testing a few prototypes, we went with a threaded way of asking for follow-ups - Dig deeper.
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The Dig Deeper helps lawyers reduce liability by helping them go further in their research
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The questions can be threaded and collapsed. Reducing clutter was a big challenge, solved by adding buttons in the hover state.
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Lawyers can also view full sources and jump to highlights relevant to the question
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Lawyers can also view full sources and jump to highlights relevant to the question
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I always give clear handover documentation to enable smooth development

Outcome

Roman and Maurice did a successful YC launch in July '23 and the MVP is being used by the legal team of N26 and Volkswagen.