The ambitious legal research startup, descrybe.ai, has successfully employed artificial intelligence to generate summaries of all available state supreme and appellate court opinions throughout the United States. Launched only a year ago, descrybe.ai is proving to be a formidable force in the democratization of access to legal information, providing smaller-firm lawyers, journalists, and the general public with an easier way to access court opinions.
Using its AI capabilities, the startup not only summarizes court opinions but also makes them searchable. As of writing, AI-generated abstracts that highlight the parties, issue, background, procedural history, analysis, and holding are available for opinions from 18 states. Compare this with cumbersome search protocols of the past that required exact words matches, descrybe.ai enables users to search using natural language – a potentially transformative development in the field of legal research.
The achievement was lauded by Kara Peterson, who co-founded descrybe.ai with her husband and software engineer, Richard DiBona. She says that the tool not only represents an alternative to traditional search methods which often come with prohibitive costs, but it also significantly lowers barriers to access legal resources.
Using descrybe.ai, search results — sorted either by relevancy or recency — show paragraph-long summaries of matching opinions. Clicking through the search results not only reveals the full case, but also the AI-generated summary and if available, the abstract.
The company is currently working on adding summaries of federal district court and appellate opinions, with the expectation to have them completed within the first half of this year. On top of this, descrybe.ai has a limited range of trial court opinions for Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
An opinion tracker within descrybe.ai allows users to monitor the progress of opinion summarizations. So far, descrybe.ai claims to have summarized 2.5 million opinions. Utilization of the site incurs no cost and requires no sign-up process.
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