Blue J Legal CEO Benjamin Alarie outlines company’s expansion plans, commits to remaining “on the forefront” in regard to deep learning technologies

In a recent Etopia News article about Blue J Legal, a Toronto-based start-up dedicated to commercializing the insights found in the ground-breaking article “The Death of Rules and Standards,” by Anthony Casey and Anthony Niblett, Professor Niblett explained how machine learning can be used to resolve gray legal issues into black-or-white “micro-directives” predicting the right answer based on the application of algorithms to extensive datasets of relevant case law.

Today, Benjamin Alarie, CEO of Blue J Legal and Osler Chair in Business Law on the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, provided Etopia News with further details regarding the directions that this pioneering legaltech firm might soon be pursuing.

Asked what new fields of law the firm might consider as grist for its analytical and predictive mill, Professor Alarie wrote:

“We expect that in the next decade that our approach to the law will become widely available throughout the world’s legal systems. Obvious applications [can be found] in private law (contracts, torts especially), criminal law, family law, labour and employment law, antitrust, tax, etc., etc.” 

 

Asked about Blue J Legal’s relationship with IBM, he replied:

“We are customers of IBM and use a number of Watson’s capabilities in delivering our solution. In addition to the NLP [Natural Language Processing] abilities of Watson, we also draw upon other, more structured, machine learning approaches in our solutions. We are committed to incorporating the leading deep learning techniques as they become commercially viable and will remain on the forefront in this regard.”