OUR INTELLIGENCE CAN BUILD INCREDIBLE SOCIETIES
Intelligence is transformative, and its potential is beyond our current reach. We will realize the unbelievable. We will live in worlds that we could not have fully foreseen. Intelligence enables humans to create new worlds for themselves. Some even claim that it has the power to destroy the worlds we live in. This concept of multiple universes has been taught to us throughout the ages in prose, song, research and prophecy. Humans have the power to shape the worlds they live in. This particular time stands out, at least in recent history, since new forms of intelligence introduced into the public sphere have compelled humans to widely believe this concept: we are the masters of our own destiny. And creating the worlds we wish to live in, together, will be a massive endeavor that will require human collaboration.
This particular time raises the endless story of the Tower of Babel: humans face a collaboration problem yet again. To cultivate and protect the worlds that we live in, we must create multiple discrete communication technologies, such as language and culture. But as the story goes, when we attempt to break free of the innate barriers to collaboration, we get caught up in multiple parallel realities competing for domination. The world, humans included, suffers from the collisions, and history repeats itself ad nauseam.
But as intelligence has it, humans are storytellers. And we are allowed to choose a different ending. Our towers of heavens and earth might not fall crumbling in our every attempt to unite humanity in responsible stewardship. Humans could collaborate to cultivate and protect their worlds, all the while creating new worlds in which we can live together. Each of us might, in moments of meditation, imagine the endless breadth of opportunity. Humans could nurture habitable climates, end extreme poverty, solve pressing geopolitical conflicts, sustainably produce wealth without harming flora and fauna, and ensure true autonomy is a viable reality for every person.
LEARNING FROM BABEL: HUMANS MUST GOVERN INTELLIGENCE TO EVOLVE
Recent developments in information processing across multiple modalities (vision, language, audio, video, etc.) propose a babel choice for humanity. In the last decade, humans have made major breakthroughs in their ability to understand one of our most important technologies: natural language. While some may take language for granted, researchers of all domains have been fascinated with it for ages. But it was not until the recent mass adoption of generative large language models that we learned how humans could create what feels like infinite meaning using natural language through multiple types of data, such as text, images, audio, and video in all forms. And what’s most surprising about this, is that this breakthrough is not the product of a specific field of research, but a collaboration of human experts in multiple disciplines.
These developments will boost human productivity in all fields of work, ushering in a new age of prosperity. And with all this productivity we risk drifting apart again, separated by the siloed worlds we’ll create. New developments in intelligence are expected to disrupt how legislators govern, regulators enforce, and industries work. We already see the early rise of issues that seem as if they were pulled directly from science fiction. Think about algorithmic bias in healthcare, intellectual property meeting large language models, and corporate mass surveillance. Whole industries are becoming increasingly complex, and our systems of trust must keep up. Indeed, this technology can help us evolve into higher beings, if we can evolve our societies.
Our systems of governance rely on people’s trust in order to operate effectively. New developments in intelligence set higher expectations from these systems, and create massive challenges. This new era calls on us to solve the problem at the core of any complex society: access to justice. This problem will be solved in our lifetime. It is a multi-disciplinary challenge that involves at least 3 core issues:
Reliable architecture for legal systems that promote fairness and equity.
The technological and financial infrastructure to make legal systems accessible to all.
The capability to easily and swiftly detect legal problems within growing data on human interaction.
The technology to solve this problem will enable the fair administration of justice throughout the worlds we live in, giving every human the chance to live autonomously, and every society to unlock the potential of trusted collaboration.
Darrow and its partners are building that technology: a foundation model for better legal systems. For better societies.
CURRENT INTELLIGENCE ISN’T ENOUGH FOR JUSTICE TO BE SERVED
A handful of technology companies dominate the justice markets, operating on an adversarial model, limiting market expansion. This approach, while theoretically designed to reveal truth through contested presentations of data, has become increasingly counterproductive in our current day and age.
On the one hand, since the adversarial model encourages companies to invest in data or expert work only to the extent they need to “win” against a potential adversary, legal technology has no incentive to evolve out of information licensing. This reduces the extent of innovation in legal systems. On the other hand, rapidly changing regulations and increasing volumes of data in complex matters, make legal risks and opportunities hard to predict, quantify and remediate on time, causing compliance fatigue and again inhibiting innovation.
For businesses, the adversarial model results in slower growth and increased legal and compliance costs, both before and after a legal issue arises. Regulators now expect companies to remediate risks in near real time, while compliance functions face reduced reporting and increased pressure for continuous monitoring. On the consumer and small business side, critical legal information and advanced technologies remain prohibitively expensive because legal technology incumbents continue to license information rather than democratize their systems, creating an uneven playing field, and contradicting the original concept of the adversarial model. Ultimately, resources are not allocated efficiently by the legal systems, causing loss of trust and wellbeing for all.
The adversarial model also limits growth for law firms. They had originally moved from fixed fees to the billable hour due to the growing complexity of regulation and litigation procedure throughout the 20th century. However, in tandem with increased efficiency from recent developments in information processing throughout the legal ecosystem, law firms are seeing a decline in hours worked per lawyer, and are reactively raising their rates at the highest level since the Great Financial Crisis in 2007-2008. This means law firms will have to find new sources for business growth. A better foundation model is needed to truly enhance efficiency while continuing to address high-value areas for deploying legal labor.
Indeed, the adversarial model is not the only possible foundation for the legal system. Legal issues would resolve swiftly and with greater accuracy if relevant and near complete data would be available to all parties, under common language that enables improved communication. Recent developments in information processing across multiple modalities enable that exactly. Under a collaborative foundation model for legal systems, efficient access to justice is a real prospect, and growth for all participants is achievable.
DARROW IS LEADING THE ADOPTION OF A COLLABORATIVE FOUNDATION MODEL
When we started Darrow back in 2020, we set out to create Frictionless Justice. Gila was the copywriter behind this concept. Looking at the growing trust humans had in businesses and the declining trust in the public systems that govern our lives, we dreamed of a venture that would strengthen people’s trust in legal systems and provide hope for the future. We chose the common B2B “frictionless X” to explain building technology to remove friction for the sake of growing access to justice.
Initially, we reached out to compliance officers and general counsel, to see if they would buy our technology to effectively predict legal risk, quantify it and employ potent mitigation strategies. We received polite declines, asking us to prove that our model could indeed predict lawsuits within unstructured data. As a result, we turned to law firms, and opened our platform to public interest law firms, representing plaintiffs in class and mass actions.
Fast forward 4 years later and over $10b in new lawsuits sourced by law firms on our platform, it is safe to say that our model is the best risk and regulatory intelligence system for proactively identifying real legal risk (or opportunity). Law firms utilize it to grow their practice, identify new legal problems, and deploy expert lawyers to effectively resolve the most impactful matters for their clients and for the American people.
We've recently given legal and compliance departments access to Darrow so they can scan their own companies to effectively detect misconduct and potential risks in near real time, quantify the risk and proactively manage legal and compliance work to drive business outcomes and reduce risk.
We believe that when law firms, corporate legal departments and compliance teams work on one collaborative platform, legal problems will be solved faster, and to the common benefit of all. The adversarial model isn’t enough for this moment in our evolution. A collaborative foundation model is key. Such a model will create better insight into how real-world events affect legal rights and liabilities, but also introduce standardized methods for measuring legal risk across the industry. Every actor in the legal ecosystem has something to gain by moving to a collaborative model for legal:
Individuals stand to gain a cost efficient manner to exercise their rights, even with low to no financial liquidity and without need to monitor violations. A collaborative incentivizes the proactive identification and evaluation of legal problems that harm any actor, including individuals. For that reason, individuals in a collaborative system can trust that they are receiving the care they deserve from the system.
Corporations will be able to easily assess the legal implications of increasing regulatory change and actual developments in their business. To that end, it will be easier to prioritize legal and compliance work aligned with business goals, as well as achieve near real time compliance. Businesses will also be able to accelerate dispute resolution, as early assessment on a materially similar foundation as the one used by law firms will push parties directly to the negotiation table, when possible, and reduce the time it takes to make a deal.
Plaintiff Facing Law Firms will be able to continuously scan publicly available data for new instances of wrongdoing in their space of expertise, quickly assess the most impactful cases that will grow the firm, and easily inform corporations working with a similar foundation model. Reducing the length of negotiation in disputes will enable plaintiff lawyers, who typically work on contingency, to spend less time on each matter and grow the quality and volume of their practices.
Law Firms working for businesses will be able to increase their visibility into key client risks, quickly assess the legal work required to remedy the issue, and explore further avenues to improve the legal hygiene of corporate clients. In this way, even if disputes become more efficient, the growth of the business of big law firms will do much more than compensate for lost billables - it will generate entire practice areas.
Financial Institutions will finally get clear access to the legal asset class. Legal finance is currently a niche, obscure market, even though legal services are bought and sold for roughly 1 trillion dollars every year. The ability to get a standardized assessment of a legal risk or opportunity from across the market, backed up by data from private and public repositories and across the ecosystem, will enable higher liquidity and velocity in the market for legal assets.
Insurance Providers will be able to model risk efficiently, simply by connecting to a company’s legal and compliance infrastructure. Connectivity will also enable a streamlined claims process that will give collaborative providers a true competitive advantage over traditional actors.
It’s quite straightforward: growing trust between actors in the legal ecosystem will shorten deal cycles and allow a greater volume of deals to close. Since visibility into once hidden legal problems will also grow, actors will not stand idle during their new earned time, but will solve even more problems for businesses, consumers and society at large.
By building this collaborative foundation for the ecosystem, Darrow has positioned itself to partner with many other startups in the legal field. We use the best legal efficiency software out there, which thanks to hundreds of new startups in the past few years, is only getting better. Efficiency AI for legal is freeing up lots of time for some of the most specialized workers in the world. Darrow will be there to help them find the next challenges that need to be solved with all that newfound time.