AI and the Future of Law: The 10 Year "Overnight" Success Story

Intro (00:00:00)

• Jake Heller, co-founder of Case Text, shares his experience in building an AI startup in the legal field.
• The goal was to apply technology to make legal work more efficient and accessible.
• There is a disconnect between the ease of consumer actions and the difficulty of legal work.
• Technology has only scratched the surface of its potential in the legal profession.

Part 1 (00:00:48)

• Jake's background is in law, and he noticed the need for technology to improve legal work.
• The difficulty of finding crucial information for a case led to the idea of using AI.
• The practice of law can have high stakes, such as life-or-death situations or impacting billion-dollar lawsuits.
• The early days of Case Text focused on crowdsourcing and applying natural language processing to legal work.

Part 2 (00:03:09)

• Case Text went through ups and downs over the course of 10 years.
• They made mistakes in assuming product-market fit and scaling too quickly.
• The breakthrough came with access to GPT-3 and GPT-4 from OpenAI.
• The AI capabilities allowed them to create a product, co-counsel, that was life-changing for their customers.
• Case Text experienced significant revenue growth and found product-market fit with the golden magic demo, showcasing the AI's ability to perform complex legal tasks quickly and accurately.
• Large language model (LLM)-based startups that can demonstrate immediate value are set to succeed in their markets.

Jake and Case Text's Success (00:10:56)

• Jake and Case Text succeeded due to their determination and customer-centric approach.
• Turning raw models into a usable product for lawyers is challenging.
• Case Text started as a user-generated content website and was prepared for the emergence of large language models (LLMs).
• LLMs, like GPT4, have the potential to read, understand, and generate text at a high level.
• This technology can revolutionize the legal field by automating tasks like document review and case evaluation.
• The impact of LLMs is just beginning, and they have the potential to make a significant difference in areas like the California Innocence Project.

The Power and Opportunity of LLMs (00:10:56)

• LLMs have the power to compress and automate the work of many people.
• The tooling and developer tools necessary to harness the power of LLMs present a significant opportunity for startups.
• The ecosystem around LLMs will resemble the cloud computing ecosystem.
• There will be a base layer of capability (LLMs), additional technologies to enhance their use (e.g., Lang chain), and an application layer built on top.

Challenges and Opportunities in Engineering LLMs (00:10:56)

• Engineering LLMs to handle thousands of users simultaneously and review millions of pages of text is a significant challenge.
• Ensuring accuracy and preventing hallucinations in the output of LLMs is another difficult task.
• Case Text had to develop their own internal solutions to address these challenges.
• There is potential for new products and technologies to support the use of LLMs in the future.

Encouraging Innovation and Entrepreneurship (00:10:56)

• Jake encourages others to start companies and apply to Y Combinator (YC).
• The moment for leveraging LLM technology is underhyped, and there is a lot of untapped potential.
• Starting a company now to work with this technology can lead to significant rewards.
• Jake's success with Case Text is an example of the possibilities with AI.
• YC provides the right advice and support for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Conclusion (00:10:56)

• Case Text's success is considered one of the biggest wins in AI.
• The speaker is proud to have worked with Jake and is excited to see what he and his team do next.
• The speaker also looks forward to seeing what others achieve with this technology.