The merger of legal research companies vLex and Fastcase in April of this year has paved the way for the significant development of artificial intelligence in legal research. Building on their combined global legal research library, the companies have unveiled the beta version of their generative AI legal research assistant, which powers legal research across multiple jurisdictions and languages, the culmination of more than a billion documents from over 110 nations.
The AI-powered platform has been built on an upgraded version of vLex’s Vincent AI. What sets this tool apart is its multi-lingual capabilities, currently supporting legal research in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, and Spain, in both English and Spanish. Jurisdiction and language support will continue to expand as development progresses, enabling more comprehensive responses to legal queries.
Vincent AI’s legal research capabilities are currently categorized into four key skills:
- Responding to queries with detailed research memo, complete with links to verified case laws or statutes;
- Constructing well-researched arguments in support of or against stated propositions;
- Comparing laws of multiple jurisdictions, presenting the findings in the user’s preferred language;
- Analyzing uploaded documents and describing the related legal authorities it includes or should consult for a comprehensive understanding.
Vincent AI also provides a user with full insight into the sources used to answer the query, providing information about the relevance and comprehensiveness of the consulted sources, as well as a percentage ranking of how well the resource answered the question. It also provides the user with direct links to the actual authorities, summaries of cases and documents, and relevant excerpts.
Some of the other AI-driven features integrated into Vincent AI include its ability to recognize legal issues in cases, generating summary headnotes for cases, and finding related legal documents from vLex’s library.
Notably, the upcoming release of Vincent AI includes Cert, a citator that has been under development since Fastcase acquired Judicata in 2020. Cert will mark cases with negative treatment tags such as “distinguished” or “overruled,” and is currently active for a limited number of jurisdictions. The new version of the Fastcase platform that will include Vincent AI is due to launch next year.
In its early phase, Vincent AI is available to select law firms. However, other interested law firms can join the beta version by signing up to a waitlist.
Despite not being hands-on with Vincent AI, early demonstrations have shown impressive ability to provide detailed responses to legal queries as well as constructing arguments related to different points of law. It seems to be a step towards transparency in AI through its methodology of drawing information only from vLex data and guiding the users to the exact resources used in its responses.