Blueshoe’s AI software, which “thinks like a lawyer,” is designed to be a reliable tool for legal practitioners in their research.
Lucas Miller
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
Blueshoe, a new artificial intelligence startup designed to assist legal research, is currently piloting its technology at several high-profile law schools, including Yale Law.
Since OpenAI launched its early demo of ChatGPT in November 2022, companies like Blueshoe have been quick to adapt large language models for legal practices. According to Blueshoe’s website, the technology can process “thousands of documents,” sort those documents into legal claims, court filings, and costs, and then analyze them using relevant statutes and case law.
Blueshoe also touts its “law-firm caliber security” for users, including enhanced encryption procedures. It also doesn’t train models on its users’ data.
Blueshoe’s CEO, Casey O’Grady, graduated from Rice University and worked briefly in finance before attending Harvard Law School. He ultimately spent most of his early career in strategy consulting, advising Fortune 500 companies on AI adoption. After O’Grady met his co-founder, Kai Yee Wan, an MIT graduate, the two founded Blueshoe, which has since partnered with startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Y Combinator describes Blueshoe as “an AI platform for legal research and reasoning designed to capture the structure of legal thought and allow users to work directly within the logic of caselaw,” while allowing users to “build and test arguments with unprecedented clarity.” In addition to Yale, Blueshoe is also currently being piloted at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School.
Such technological innovation in law has raised concerns over potential inaccuracies in its research. Early in their development, similarly large language models struggled with “hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which AI produces false, fabricated information. Hallucinations have led to ramifications for lawyers. In one instance, a lawyer faced potential sanctions for using an AI tool that cited fabricated precedent.
In an interview with The Buckley Beacon, O’Grady indicated that he’s aware of these challenges and is designing Blueshoe to combat them. “Our product is designed to prevent some of the downsides of AI, like hallucinations and bad reasoning, and lazy lawyering,” he said.
O’Grady does not see his product as a replacement for lawyers, but rather as a tool lawyers can use to automate menial tasks, allowing them to focus more of their time on complex questions. “We are creating something that is more iterative with lawyers. The application of AI technology really has been largely an enhancement to lawyer work and not a replacement,” O’ Grady said.
Other startups are also implementing new legal technologies, recognizing the industry’s lag in innovation. A 2020 survey by Wolters Kluwer, a Dutch multinational consulting firm, revealed that 79 percent of lawyers in legal departments considered efficiency and productivity to be important factors in their choice of law firm. In the same study, 28 percent said their practices demonstrate efficiency and productivity.
Gabriel Stiritz, CEO of the legal tech startup Lexamica, views that statistic as an opportunity. As the former CFO and COO of Sanford Law Firm, an employment practice, Stiritz gained firsthand experience dealing with the inefficiencies of a law firm.
In a call with The Beacon, Stiritz called his experience at Sanford “a masterclass in all of the ways that law is and is not done well, from an operational, finance, and technology perspective.”
Stiritz furthered that his experience with operational inefficiencies in the practice of law piqued his interest in legal innovation. “I started going to legal tech conferences, talking to other leaders in law firms, and learning about what was happening in the space. And it was actually really encouraging. There were a lot of startups,” he told The Beacon. “But when I got involved in 2019, [legal tech] was really, to some degree, still just getting started. There were a lot of empty spaces between what was being taken to market and what I saw internally as the guy who is supposed to run a law firm, soup to nuts.”
In 2023, Stiritz founded Lexamica, which he describes as the “first full-cycle referral management platform for legal referrals.” Lexamica allows law firms to refer clients to other firms in an organized manner, avoiding “the missed updates, the fuzzy handoffs, and the endless spreadsheets” of manual legal referrals.
Earlier this year, Lexamica secured an investment from the Venture Center Arkansas Fund, which invests in Arkansas-based technology-driven companies. The exact dollar value and financial terms remain undisclosed.
Students, researchers, and faculty at Yale Law School can sign up for Blueshoe by providing their name and a Yale email address.