Indian Start-Up AnviLegal To Trigger Legal AI Price War

Indian legal AI company, AnviLegal, is to begin a price war in the AI doc review market by providing contract analysis services for 10% of what current Western AI companies are charging, says its founder.

AnviLegal, the brainchild of Hyderabad-based tech developer, Anirudh Loya (pictured above), has been working on building the company over the last 18 months and is now in Beta testing with law firms and corporates.

The company has three main offerings: Anvi Insight, which is the doc review tool and is in Beta testing; Anvi Intelligence, which is its legal research tool based at present on local case law; and the third service line, Anvi Robot, which is a machine learning document generation tool.

At present it would appear that it is the doc review tool that has the greatest potential to make an impact, it’s also the product that is most well-developed. It currently operates in English, but Anvi will seek to develop a Hindi and also a Spanish language version.

While there are now a growing number of legal AI doc review companies in the market, Anvi’s USP is likely to be price, a factor that some law firms have mentioned is a worry for them in terms of AI adoption.

Loya tells Artificial Lawyer that: ‘We want to blow up the current pricing model for AI document review. At present it’s very costly.’

He adds that unlike some AI companies, they will not charge clients to pilot the software. They will also offer a pricing model of around $500 per user per month, with the ability for a team of seven lawyers to subscribe with a special deal to the AI system for $1,500 a month. Usage of Anvi is unlimited, with the company handling data through Google Cloud.

The Anvi Insight interface

At these prices legal AI doc review is put within reach of the smallest law firms, whether in the West or in the developing world. If AnviLegal’s offering can catch on and can meet expectations, it may well end up disrupting the legal AI disruptors, at least on price.

Anvi is not the only legal AI company to emerge from India. Recently, Artificial Lawyer covered Surukam, which is also offering doc review services among other AI-driven services. Surukam was one of the legal tech companies to join the Mishcon de Reya accelerator in London. At the same time UK insurance law firm, Kennedys has teamed up with AI tech group Cognitive Computing Services, based in Kerala to help with its insurance defence products for clients.

Meanwhile, leading legal AI company, Kira Systems, also announced in January this year that it had signed a user agreement with top Indian law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas.

In short, India is becoming both a market for legal AI products and also a source of new legal AI companies.

The development is doubly interesting given that India is also a centre of excellence for BPO and LPO activities, which tend to focus on efficiency savings and process improvement, which is well-suited to AI technology.

The growth of a new Indian legal AI sector is also interesting in relation to China, which sees India as an economic rival and is also very keen to develop a legal AI industry of its own, (see Artificial Lawyer coverage here.)

That said, Loya explains that India’s legal market, which serves a nation of 1.33 billion people, is not quite as up to speed with AI as North America or Western Europe and the UK, even if it has at least three documented legal AI companies now. But, he adds, things could change quickly once a certain level of acceptance of AI tech was reached.

‘In India the adoption [of new legal tech] is slow, but then suddenly it can move very fast,’ he concludes.

The same to some extent has been true in the West, where legal AI companies have been in existence for several years, but it is only in the last 18 months that commercial use and broader adoption in markets such as the UK and US has accelerated.

In which case, Indian legal AI, especially at a unique and super competitive price point, could one day be a real market mover.