Introducing JADE Chat-and-Know™

Over the past year, our legal research boffins have been working to make your legal research faster, better, and more enjoyable. We could think of few better ways than mobilising our massive database of legal knowledge and making it available at your (voice) command.

With JADE professional’s emerging Chat-and-Know™ technology, we are taking the next big step towards a conversational model for legal research. Starting today, we are inviting our existing JADE professional users to sign up to our limited beta. To join, please speak with your JADE professional consultant. If you have not already signed up to JADE professional, please ask about joining this beta after you sign up.

Conversational legal research is nothing new

Remember the good old days, back before the arrival of AustLII in the mid-1990s, when we would ask our colleagues for assistance, and discuss our most pressing legal questions with them. And that process would elicit a range of legal possibilities that boolean searching simply could not capture.

The coherence of law was manifest in those discussions, as was the imprecision of the answers we would receive, often requiring many hours of further library research. The collegiality of the legal profession was cemented by this common quest for legal knowledge.

We need to campaign for the value of ‘less is more’

Since the rise of online legal research, the art of conversational legal research has been undervalued: it seems that vast quantities of irrelevant results churned out through imperfect and primitive electronic legal research tools have gained undeserved ascendancy.

In this age of research excess, we have forgotten that simplicity and clarity is often more valuable than the presentation of every decision in which a discretion is exercised. We need to remember that ‘less is more’, for our clients, in court, and because people want us to tell them the time and not build them a clock.

Conversational legal research is about reclaiming and reimagining how legal research might be in the post-screen age. By using only your voice, you will be able to undertake legal research and get answers to some of the most difficult questions. Strike up a conversation about the rule of law. Discover answers to questions through a simple conversation. Cross-examine, Jasmine, our JadeBot.

Conversational examples

With Jasmine, you will be able to have conversations. We will publish some examples in our next post.

Categories: Content, JADE Professional, New Features, Uncategorized