Alexsei
Legal memos on demandFAQ
We have been asked so many questions about our technology and vision for the company and product. We’ve put together some of the more popular ones below. If you have a question not in the list below, please email team@alexsei.com and we’ll be sure to add it.
Alexsei is a web-based software tool that provides answers to legal research questions in memo format, and is exclusively for legal professionals in good standing with their governing body. In addition, Alexsei permits law firms to organize their database of legal research memoranda more efficiently. Once your firm’s acount is set up, you may upload your existing database of legal memoranda and exploit Alexsei’s sophisticated search tool to more easily review past work that has already been completed within your firm.
Every time a research question gets submitted, Alexsei automates several searches to identify relevant articles. In these articles, the most authoritative cases are often referenced. Moreover, we have established partnerships with various courts to get direct access to judgments, much in the same way the other legal publishers do. More importantly, however, our database of legal memos is very large and growing incredibly fast every day.
Absolutely! Even though we rely on our database of legal memos to train our software, we never duplicate explicit sections from one client’s memo and use it to produce another. Every memo that we produce is shared only with the users on the account, and seen only by a small group of lawyers and engineers employed by Alexsei.
The combination of advanced software and economies of scale permit Alexsei to provide significant value for a highly reduced price. Traditional legal research practices have been very inefficient; fortunately, Alexsei is here to change that.
Alexsei works by automating much of the legal research task through the training of sophisticated machine learning software. Any nuance involved in answering a legal research question that cannot be fully automated with the technology that currently exists is filled in by lawyers with experience in the particular area of law. By aggregating this human element of legal research, Alexsei can continue to provide highly precise answers to complex legal questions at a significantly reduced costs.
We are constantly striving to reduce the turnaround time for an answer. Currently, though, you can expect an answer roughly 24 hours after submitting your search query.
Answers are provided in memo format, consisting of the issue and background facts provided by the user, a brief conclusion of the legal principles, an overview of the law related to the issue, and all authorities relied on in the answer.
Currently, Alexsei operates within the legal jurisdiction of Ontario, Canada. We have plans to expand into the rest of Canada and the United States of America very soon.
Absolutely. The trends of increasing software sophistication and capacity are truly astounding. While there is much hype surrounding what is currently possible, there is also much evidence to suggest that in the near to medium-term future, even the most intellectually demanding tasks associated with legal research will be entirely automated. When it comes to recall, memory, and speed of computation, humans simply cannot compete with computers. Computers still have a ways to go, however, when it comes to analytical reasoning, drawing inferences, and following a line of argument. Whether these skills are simply derived from some combination of recall, memory, and computation, or if there is still much to learn about higher order cognitive processes, full automation of legal research is inevitable.
The implications are overwhelmingly positive. While some lawyers and law students may feel threatened by the thought of automation of legal research, the need for humans in the provision of legal services will persist, and arguably increase. The costs of legal services must come down, however, and access to justice must be improved. Further automation of legal research will help achieve this.
Alexsei relies on various technologies, some open source, some publicly available, and some built in-house. Regardless, the real value of Alexsei is realized from the unique combination of technologies and their novel application to a particular problem.
In law school, yes. However, we believe that the sooner law students and young associates stop doing menial legal research tasks, and adopt autonomous solutions like Alexsei, they can instead focus on developing skills necessary for being an excellent advocate. Consider this: while it is still important for grade-school students to learn the mechanics of long division, divison of large numbers is nevertheless always completed by calculators in industry. Now, the same should be true for legal research!
If you find a material error in the answer provided, please contact us so we can understand your issue and make any necessary adjustments to the memo and our software. To help us ensure you are satisfied with your memo, please follow our Guide to Asking Questions as closely as possible.
When you join Alexsei, we make onboarding your entire legacy database of legal research very simple. Within hours, you can review all your legal research by issue statement, use natural language queries to find most relevent work, and filter your database by categories of law. Thanks to our sophisticated machine learning tools built specifically for legal content, Alexsei is a Knowledge Management tool for lawyers like no other.
Certainly. We have leveraged Alexsei’s technology to provide a highly sophisticated Knowledge Management tool as a distinct product.
We have a variety of pricing models to best suit your practice. Contact sales for more information.
In some cases, legal research requires significant amount of time and employee resources within a law firm. While some of this time can be billed to a client, much of it is written off and non-billable. With Alexsei, you may agree with your clients that legal research queries will be charged to the client. In such a case, your entire legal research costs can be eliminated, allowing you to focus on applying the law to your client’s needs.
You may submit multiple issues in one research query as long as they are all logically, or contingently, related. While several questions may be related in some way, if they are not contingent to one another, or they are only tangentially related, then a new research request is required.
