Synch’s Legal AI Team Spins Out To Form Maigon

Pioneering Swedish Legal Services Business, Synch, has spun out its AI software team to create Maigon, which has a special focus on developing NLP tools for legal use cases.

Artificial Lawyer caught up with Maigon CTO, Sergii Shcherbak, to find out what the move was all about. (You can also read more about Synch here.)

Why the spin out into a separate business? 

Having a legal AI development unit run as an independent venture is more practical and allows for more flexibility. Developing and providing legal AI solutions and services as a law firm is more difficult due to the strict rules of the Swedish Bar Association.

Maigon is a separate software company which has assumed Synch’s software IP and continues the development. The new company was created by the founders of Synch and co-founded by the digital department lead Magnus Sundqvist, and myself as the software development lead.

Synch has a growing customer base and strong international brand, and the law firm will be one of Maigon’s partners from day one. The core team of Synch remains with the firm. I have fully transitioned to Maigon as the CTO.

What is the new business going to offer? 

It will provide ready-to-use practical legal AI solutions, such as Maigon DPA for accelerated review of data processing agreements, and Maigon PPC, which reviews privacy policies for GDPR compliance.

As an independent legal AI company, we also provide software development and data engineering services, and we are open to and currently involved in Legal Tech collaborations with law firms, software vendors, and large international companies.

Will Synch still do work in relation to legal tech? 

Synch remains and will be a leading European innovative and technology-oriented law firm, and many exciting projects and ideas will keep originating from it. Synch also has a very strong, internationally recognised legal advisory capability in the domains of Legal Tech, IP and e-commerce.

How are you coping with the Covid-19 impact?

As regards Synch, as a law firm with a strong digital presence from the beginning, it was technologically ready for a scenario like this. Digital client portals and collaboration tools made the COVID-19 impact minimal for the customers.

As to Maigon, its focus is providing digital services which automate part of repetitive legal work. All of the Maigon AI solutions are available via Web interface or email, and their integration into the customers’ workflows, remote or not, is easy and seamless.

In addition, as part of the Maigon website, we launched a COVID-19 free clause extraction tool, which can instantly highlight force majeure clauses in any type of contracts.

What is the growth plan now?

We have a few top priorities. First: our existing customers which deployed Maigon DPA in their workflows. We are currently developing customized platform versions for separate clients (e.g. the Maigon DPA Playbook).

At the same time, we are actively expanding the customer base: many international vendors are interested in time-saving solutions like ours.

We even have projected collaborations in non-English speaking markets too: our language-agnostic AI models can help automate legal work in jurisdictions where the presence of legal AI is very low or practically non-existent.

Another important aspect is improving our pilot products iteration-by-iteration, based majorly on customer feedback. Being in constant contact with our customers, we are doing our best to build solutions that customers want and need, and which have a real practical application and add business value.

Thanks Sergii, and good luck with the new group!