206 | 🤯 🧑‍💻 I used AI to quiz myself on legal complaint (Anthropic's new model)

In today’s Brainyacts:

1. “Lawyer-in-the-loop” startup for in-house teams

2. Claude Sonnet 3.5 Walk-through

3. New AI/Human social network and other AI model news

4. AI v Crypto and more news you can use

   👋 to new subscribers!

To read previous editions, click here.

Lead Memo

A Chat with Wordsmith AI CEO, Ross McNairn

“Lawyers are smart, commercial and value-add assets. It's often a lonely job, especially when ‘isolated from the pack’ and working in-house, and most lawyers didn't train for years to process basic contract reviews and shuffle paper. The moment you liberate them from this work they start to move into more stimulating jobs.” Ross McNairn, CEO of Wordsmith AI.

This caught my eye. A Scottish legal startup just raised $ 5 million from fairly significant investors. When I looked at the company and tool, some things stood out.

First, the founders have highly useful backgrounds (not always the case in legal tech land). Actual engineering and product chops from Meta and Microsoft as well as a few other notable companies.

Second, they emphasize “lawyer-in-the-loop” and have designed the tool to allow for AI-generated efficiencies but with lawyer sign-off.

Third is the problem they address – it’s a biggie for many in-house teams. Many teams are inundated with inbound requests from their internal business customers. Reviewing marketing materials, looking up contract provisions, verifying obscure compliance parameters – all of these are important yet are not the type of work most in-house lawyers and paralegals want to be doing – but currently, they have to OR their business customers simply avoid going to legal at all.

Finally, their methodology and evaluation are a bit more detailed and transparent than many other legal tech startups. I would like to see more about what specific models they use as well as what system prompts they have used to help tune and control their tool. But I will take what I can get – which again, is more than many share.

The CEO was kind enough to respond to a LinkedIn-based Q&A. Here is a short piece on them.

Wordsmith AI, co-founded by McNairn, Robbie Falkenthal, and Volodymyr Giginiak, is designed to streamline in-house legal operations. By enabling lawyers to train the AI on specific workflows, the platform makes legal knowledge management more efficient. This feature allows company employees to self-serve their information needs, reducing the burden on legal teams.

"Wordsmith lets lawyers teach our AI how to follow steps to complete complex legal jobs," explains McNairn. The platform supports tasks such as contract reviews, NDA checks, and data privacy assessments, traditionally time-consuming processes now completed in minutes.

“Lawyer-in-the-Loop” Ensuring Accuracy and Reliability

One of Wordsmith AI’s key attributes is its ability to verify and approve AI-generated answers before they are sent out. This ensures that legal teams maintain control and accuracy over the information provided. "AI makes mistakes; we prepare answers and show the working so it’s simple for legal to give it four eyes, tweak it, and release it," McNairn elaborates.

Integrating with Existing Tools

Recognizing that lawyers prefer familiar tools, Wordsmith AI integrates seamlessly with platforms like email and MS Word. This reduces the need for additional training and makes the transition to AI-assisted workflows smoother for legal professionals. As McNarin noted, “[lawyers] do not want to leave email and Word.  So, we really invested time in making it so they do not need to login to new platforms and learn some magical prompting.”

Addressing Security Concerns

When I asked about their approach to privacy and security, McNairn noted the advantage of working in the EU, “Strangely, working with a lot of public companies in the EU is actually a bit of an advantage here as the data privacy laws are quite comprehensive, so if you can crack it for them it scales well.” Anyone who has wrestled with GDPR and related policies knows it’s not easy to navigate. “It's not a simple answer,” McNairn continues, “it’s a thousand papercuts, but the general design principles are that we let our companies control their data and where possible keep it vaulted in their systems. The data we deal with is so sensitive, we needed to invest a lot of time in ensuring that it's not being used to train any models and that it's kept private to each company using us," McNairn notes.

Unexpected Benefits: In-house Lawyers Care About the User Experience of their Internal Customers

Even though McNiarn is a lawyer, he was still shocked to learn how big of a challenge knowledge management still is. "It shocked us how much of a problem something as seemingly simple as knowledge management is for lawyers," says McNairn. He continues, “the teams that use us have really ramped this far far more than we ever thought. Ultimately, Wordsmith is really built for the rest of the company to interact more effectively with the legal team. It surprised us how critical the experience for the execs or the sales team was for the lawyers using our platform.”

Addressing Concerns About AI and Job Displacement

While there are concerns about AI reducing the need for junior lawyers and paralegals, McNairn argues that AI tools like Wordsmith AI allow legal professionals to focus on more valuable work. "Every single business we work with, without fail, wants more from their lawyers. If they have double their capacity, they get used twice as much," he explains.

Future Prospects

Currently, Wordsmith AI is selective with client onboarding to ensure dedicated support during the transition to AI-driven workflows. They have disclosed that DLA Piper is a current customer. The company offers a mailing list for those interested in exploring legal AI further. Find it at the bottom of the website: https://www.wordsmith.ai/

Spotlight

 Claude Sonnet 3.5 is here with “Artifacts”

Anthropic just released Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This is a new upgraded model that surpasses rivals like GPT-4o and its predecessor Opus across key benchmarks with significant speed boosts and cost reductions.

• It’s free (with limitations on number of interactions) Pro users get more interactions. In either case, usage limits are dependant on the size and length of your inputs.

• 3.5 Sonnet outperforms Opus and GPT-4o across several benchmarks for reasoning, code, math, and knowledge abilities.

• ‘Artifacts’ is a new feature allowing users to view, edit, and build with Claude in a real-time side panel workspace.

• 3.5 versions of Haiku and Opus are coming ‘later this year’, along with news features like Memory.

I spent 10 minutes walking you through it. I show you:

• the benchmarks

• the idiosyncrasies of prompting it to get Artifacts to work

• how to create an infograph

• how to create a web page

• 🚨🚨how to create a working quiz

AI Model Notables

► Former Snap engineer launches Butterflies, a social network where AIs and humans coexist

► AI-powered topic modeling using Claude enhances analysis of UK summary judgment cases (paper)

► Ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever – who helped oust Sam Altman – to start a safe AI company

► OpenAI buys Rockset to bolster its enterprise AI offering

News You Can Use:

➭ AI vs. Crypto: A battle or a beautiful dance?

➭ The State of Crypto + AI 2024

➭ New research paper seeks to categorize and name the misuses of GenAI (I asked Claude Sonnet 3.5 to create the chart of key findings below)

➭ Dell is in the AI ecosystem; building an AI factory for xAI’s massive supercomputer.

➭ I previously shared the story of the AI-baed mayoral candidate in Wymoning - OpenAI shut off his account: Mayor AI? OpenAI shuts down tools for two AI political candidates.

➭ Citigroup just released a new GPS report on AI in finance, predicting that the technology could have a bigger impact on banking jobs than in any other industry — with over half of roles at high risk of AI automation.

Who is the author, Josh Kubicki?

Some of you know me. Others do not. Here is a short intro. I am a lawyer, entrepreneur, and teacher. I have transformed legal practices and built multi-million dollar businesses. Not a theorist, I am an applied researcher and former Chief Strategy Officer, recognized by Fast Company and Bloomberg Law for my unique work. Through this newsletter, I offer you pragmatic insights into leveraging AI to inform and improve your daily life in legal services.