LISA, AI Robot Lawyer at Large

by Startacus Admin

At Startacus, we are fond of AI startups - in the past few weeks alone, we’ve written about chatbot Replika, personal assistant Gluru, and pocket butler myAlfred.

We also love fellow businesses, that at their heart, aim to support the startup and wider entrepreneurial sector.

So a disruptive startup that is both AI focused and also aims to support, in part, businesses and entrepreneurs - bingo, it must be our lucky day!!

Officially launched just last week, LISA - Legal Intelligence Support Assistant - allows users to create legally-binding Non-Disclosure Agreements in less than 7 minutes.

Individuals and companies large or small, from freelance consultants to artists: NDAs are among the most required legal documents in any business. But the problem is that only big companies are likely to have their own legal department with staff capable of drawing up airtight documents. Everyone else has to go through the time and expense of outsourcing to a lawyer to do it for them.

LISA is designed so that this doesn’t need to be the case. The AI guides the user through a succinct, 10-step process to nail down the details of the NDA, whereupon ‘she’ delivers it to the recipient. Then she runs the recipient through the same process in order to ensure both parties (though it isn’t restricted to just two people or businesses) are happy with, and understand, the document. Once everyone is onboard, it can be executed. 

LISA is the vision and brain-child of Chrissie Lightfoot, acclaimed ‘futurist’, entrepreneur, lawyer, Visiting Fellow at Westminster Law School and advisor to the board of the Telegraph’s Digital Enterprise Network. LISA has been developed in collaboration with practising solicitors, drawing on decades of entrepreneurial, technical, corporate and 

commercial legal experience - the other co-founder of LISA is Adam Duthie who is also a solicitor.

“We know that in the UK, 54% of all small businesses and 33% of consumers muddle through unrepresented when they should really be seeking legal help. In the USA and Canada the situation is even worse, with 80% and 90% of businesspeople respectively ‘making do’ without the help of a human lawyer. LISA is designed to enable these people, who do not have the means to protect themselves, to do just that.” - Chrissie Lightfoot, CEO

LISA requires no legal knowledge and is so simple to use that there is no excuse to keep downloading templates from the internet that may be full of holes and would never stand up in court. It might be difficult to put a price on peace of mind, but when that price is free, you’d have to be mad - or terrified of Skynet - not to take advantage of the opportunity.

Although NDAs are the focus of LISA currently, the goal is to eventually make additional tools available in the near future and LISA is also collaborating with the University of Westminster and Westminster Law School to further its groundbreaking initiatives.

Although AI probably won’t replace human lawyers in any of our lifetimes, at least it can make the basics, like binding documents, a little more accessible.

We look forward to hearing more about LISA as it’s proposition develops - we hope we've made a decent case for it. 

• #ai
• #ai startup
• #lisa
• #lisa - legal intelligence support assistant
• #non-disclosure agreements
• #nda
• #chrissie lightfoot

Published on: 9th April 2017