Meet the New + Improved ROSS Intelligence Research Platform, (+ Commentary)

Meet The New ROSS

This is a Guest Re-Post by ROSS Intelligence’s CEO, Andrew Arruda.

The core ROSS legal research platform can now be used by researchers in every area of American law, as it now includes a full suite of case law from all practices areas as well as statutes & regulations. In addition, in line with feedback from our users we’ve continued to refine our interface for a sleeker, more modern look and feel, for a better and more intuitive user experience. (Note: see end of piece for interview with Andrew Arruda.)

The biggest change is that this version now contains ALL American case law. It is no longer necessary for the user to choose a practice area before asking a question, as ROSS will automatically retrieve relevant answers across all US practice areas of law.

Of course, users are still able to instantly filter their substantive questions of law with the use of ROSS’ elegantly simple natural language search. For instance, to filter your search by jurisdiction date, you might try something like: “How do courts apply the Matthews cost-benefit test to determine the scope of a plaintiff’s procedural due process rights in the administrative context in Arkansas after 1997?”

Statutes & Regulations

Just like asking your Natural Language (NLP-based) question to search for case law, the way to search for Statutes & Regulations is by asking a legal question. Upon asking your legal research question, you can switch to the Statutes and to the Regulations tabs.

Answer cards are shown for sections of the Statutes or for the Regulations that are relevant to the question posed in the search bar. Upon clicking on the card, these will open the full chapter where these sections come from.

Statutes for “obstruction of justice” for all supported jurisdiction

ROSS Legal Research Tool Statutes and regulationsWe’ve also moved the navigation from being horizontal on the top to vertical on the left-hand side. We refer to the new navigation as the “left nav”. All content will appear in the large space to the right of the nav, and you’ll use the left nav to switch between functions. Additionally, answers returned from cases which have received a negative treatment are now circled in red.

ROSS Legal Research Tool Statutes and Regulations

Brief Analyzer

This featured, originally released in our completely free EVA tool, is included in the core ROSS product. We played around a bit with layout and design, and after some focus group, we elected to include it on the left nav bar, rather than in its previous setup through a modal window.

We also continued to flesh out its functionality, meaning that you can now upload any legal document (not just briefs), either in a .doc, .docx or a .pdf format (note: password protected docs still cause issues sometimes, but this didn’t seem to be a major issue for our users).

ROSS Legal Research Tool, brief analyzer

Like before, within 1-2 seconds of uploading your doc, you’ll receive a comprehensive and hyperlinked list of cases cited in the brief that have received negative treatments.

These cases can then be viewed in ROSS, and incorporated into your research workflow (saved, emailed, printed, instantly summarized, used as a launching for natural language based semantic analysis.)

ROSS Legal Research Brief Analysis

Law Monitor

This is the notifications section with the ability to view saved notifications found in the new Active Queries item on the left nav.

ROSS is trained to track developments in the law with respect to users’ legal issues and send notifications with relevant legal updates. The natural language system we’ve built out allows us to depart from the older, brute force push notifications tied to specific tagged cases being appealed, overturned, etc. Stay tuned for some fun additional buildouts related to this capability moving forward.

ROSS Legal Research tool, law monitor

What’s next?

We don’t want to give away too much info because there will be plenty more announcements like this coming down the pipe, but in the big picture, the above changes mark the beginning of an iterative process where our engineering team will be conducting weekly sprints to push to production both incremental improvements to the existing ROSS system as well as introducing entire new AI systems to the platform.

Artificial Lawyer interview with Andrew Arruda, CEO and Cofounder of ROSS Intelligence, on the significance of the latest developments.

Andrew Arruda, ROSS Intelligence

Why is this a big deal?

This is a big deal because it marks the first example of a natural language based tool, created by a true AI company, that is available for use by any lawyer in the United States, regardless of their practice, client base or even business model.

Lawyers in every jurisdiction, on every career path, will be able to benefit from the cutting edge technology that is already transforming other industries.

Why do this now?

Machine learning systems have an exponential growth curve, meaning that you typically want to deploy a system onto a relatively small, and discrete dataset (i.e. federal bankruptcy law, where ROSS got its start), before moving into exponentially larger data sets.

This allowed us to provide a solution which was immediately helpful out-of-the-box in early 2016, while steadily expanding the scope of its coverage, leading up to this current mass-scale deployment.

Expect the process to repeat itself as we now move into statutes & regs, as well as into additional countries and legal systems.

How do you see ROSS fitting into the ever changing ecosystem of legal research now, especially with these new capabilities?

With each new feature and improvement that our engineering team pushes to production, ROSS will become further incorporated into every stage of our users’ workflows.

Now that we’ve expanded into every area of US law, our engineers are working with our existing partners to start fleshing out ways that ROSS can use our proprietary natural language processing engine to do highly advanced semantic search.

In the future, ROSS will not only be able to find you the exact answer to your legal query in case law in seconds, it will also be able to find you that answer in the exact type of case you are looking for as well.

Thanks, Andrew and congratulations on the continued growth of ROSS.