Fancy a legal document, tailored by using GPT-4, for just $2? Well, if that’s up your street, then read on.
DocPro Limited, based in Hong Kong and the brainchild of Kim Chan – a former Standard Chartered and Morgan Stanley lawyer, has bagged a $500,000 pre-seed investment round from Multiway Industries to support the growth of its new ‘DocLegal.ai’ offering.
DocLegal.AI is described as a ‘professional AI tool for legal documents…powered by GPT-4’.
The company said: ‘DocLegal.ai aims to be the most accessible and affordable legal tech solution globally, offering legal documents at prices as low as $2 per document. This initiative will make high-quality legal services readily available to professionals, businesses and individuals alike.’
Chan of DocPro Limited, added: ‘Our goal is to enhance the delivery of legal services by harnessing AI to make legal processes more efficient and accessible. This pre-seed investment from Multiway Industries will allow us to accelerate our development efforts, expand our offerings, and improve the overall user experience.’
The company, which started around 2020, added that its other main product DocPro.com, which also enables the drafting of standard legal docs albeit without the genAI bit, has ‘over 50,000 registered users worldwide’.
Moving into genAI tooling to help customise standardised contracts therefore appears to be a logical move.
So, how does it work? The website states that the AI assistant / chatbot helps you pick a document type that fits your needs, then you can customise it, and then later download it into Word and alter it further.
The site’s Q&A section stresses that what it offers is better than just the outputs of ChatGPT and this is because ‘DocLegal.AI is a dedicated legal platform that benefits from the expertise of legal professionals who draft the documents and train the model.’
The Q&A also stresses that the company is not offering legal advice, just documents. These documents can also be fashioned to work in different jurisdictions, it added.
Meanwhile, investor Multiway Industries is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of extension cords and power adaptors, and says it is ‘committed to supporting innovative technology companies’.
So, there you go.
Is this the legal AI dream made real? Are these super-affordable legal documents on tap with an added genAI tailoring ability, across multiple jurisdictions, the answer to filling in part of the justice gap?
The deciding factor, as is often the case with on-demand contract platforms made for the general public and small businesses, is whether the documents provided are the right fit for your specific needs and your jurisdiction. Moreover, as you fill them in, do they contain all the information that needs to be there, and have you created a final document that will stand up in the local courts?
Inevitably – or until AI tools become a lot wiser – those users who prefer to err on the side of caution will perhaps want to seek out legal help before using an online template that they’ve then modified with the help of GPT-4. But then, the same challenge about whether to seek out a lawyer instead of tapping inexpensive online legal resources has been true for many years, and well before AI arrived.
And then, equally inevitably, is the argument that in a world where many people cannot afford legal advice….then what’s the alternative?
As always we are stuck between these two poles: the reality that a lawyer with years of local expertise would be great, and then the corresponding reality that the help of such a professional is going to be a LOT more than $2.
The conclusion is that there is no answer to this conundrum, not yet. But, perhaps in a decade or so, when generative AI systems really are providing results that equate to the best advice from an experienced lawyer and can perceive all the subtleties of one’s legal needs, then such services might really rock the legal world (if Bar organisations around the planet allow them to grow…). We shall inevitably find out at some point.