For many years there have been efforts to create an easy to use, reliable and affordable legal AI system that will give people advice and even draft documents for them. With Contend Legal we may finally have got there.
Now, this is not an ‘end of lawyers’ type of moment, but Contend’s founders do see it making a difference, especially in relation to the access to justice crisis. They charge just £19 per month, plus you can cancel at any time, so you could get a lot of help in a short space of time at a price no lawyer would offer.
It’s focused on civil matters that members of the public may face, e.g. disputes with landlords, and you can see an AL TV Product Walk Through of how it works and then some Q&A with its co-founder, Mike Stych. Press Play to watch inside the page.
Stych was formerly part of the leadership team at DraftWise, a Y Combinator-backed legal tech company. His co-founder Will Boan is a lawyer and software engineer, formerly at KPMG.
As explained in the video, Contend is for now focused on England and Wales. And before you start to say the words ‘unauthorized practice of law’, remember that in England you don’t have to be a lawyer to give legal advice or engage with legal matters, aside from in relation to what are called the ‘reserved activities’, such as conveyancing, i.e. buying or selling property.
The next question – and one that no doubt the cynics will ask, and rightly so – is: does it really work? Well, the short answer is that it certainly appears to, taking a person through a subtle series of questions that adapt to the responses and which try to lead you to a useful outcome, such as drafting a letter for you. This site suggests that you try it out yourself to see, (there’s a free trial offer).
Also, Stych is the first to say that Contend may not do everything for you and that your initial engagement with it may lead a person to eventually get a regular lawyer. But, at least it provides some initial support, something which isn’t available to many people.
Its backbone is LLM technology, plenty of system prompts and a lot of testing and refinement to ensure that the results are correct. See the video above for more on that.
But, beyond the technical aspects, as Stych told Artificial Lawyer: ‘Contend is able to provide legal guidance on a wide range of questions, helping everyday people get clear and fast answers to legal questions. Built with accuracy as the main focus, Contend is helping the millions of people each year who have a legal problem and fail to effectively solve it.’
Give it a try, you can find it here. And although some will understandably say ‘You should just use a real lawyer’, the reply has to be ‘It’s easy to say that, but millions of people can’t even afford to engage a lawyer for basic advice’, so surely this is a big improvement?
—
Note: the video IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE and is only a product demonstration of Contend.legal. Also, the video shows a tool that relates to England & Wales legal needs only. This video is for information purposes only.