Jus Mundi
Litigation: analyticsSearch: case lawSearch: legislation
jusmundi.com
Contents
- What does it claim to do?
- Substantiation of claims & potential issues
- How might the end-user assess effectiveness?
- What form does it take?
- Is it currently in use?
- The creators
- Jurisdiction
- License
What does it claim to do?
Jus Mundi offers tools for international legal and arbitrator research. It includes multiple services, such as a multi-lingual search engine, a CiteMap for international treaties, and analytics.
Claimed essential features
- Open access.
- Gathers and structures legal data from around the world.
- Provides analytics and monitoring of lawyers’ and arbitrators’ performance.
“…Jus Mundi is a one-stop destination for international legal and arbitrator research. Jus Mundi strives to make international law and arbitration easily accessible and understandable, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to collect and structure global legal data. By combining law and technology, Jus Mundi enhances lawyers’ decision making by giving them access to critical legal information and analytics on arbitrators” (Jus Mundi secures €1 million Seed Funding to make International Law and Arbitration easily accessible worldwide; archived)
Open access: “every legal document on Jus Mundi is freely available to everyone.” (Jus Mundi, About Us; archived)
“Browse arbitrators, lawyers & experts profiles. Cross-data analytics for caseload, expertise, & working history.” (Smart Search for International Law and Arbitration; archived)
Conflict Checker “identifies relationships between individuals (arbitrators, counsel or tribunal’s secretaries, not experts yet), firms or States.” (Conflict Checker; archived)
“Track arbitrators and cases to monitor activity relevant to your search. Personalized alerts deliver relevant information before you even begin searching.” (Smart Search for International Law and Arbitration; archived)
“Find arbitrators’, experts’ position, or opposing counsel’s pleadings on a legal issue.” (Smart Search for International Law and Arbitration; archived)
- Multilingual search provides relevant results from multiple languages.
- CiteMap pinpoints relevant parts of decisions and treaties.
“By activating this [multi-lingual] feature and entering your search in English or French, you will receive relevant search results in all languages available in our database, including English, French, Spanish, and many other!” (About Jus Mundi Search Engine; archived)
“Our search engine identifies relevant portions of documents beyond your keywords.” (About Jus Mundi Search Engine; archived)
“Using CiteMap for international treaties, pinpoint the precise paragraphs of the decisions mentioning the treaty article.” (Jus Mundi Public International Law & Law of the Sea; archived)
- Provides peer-reviewed information from practitioners and academics.
“Wiki Notes are peer-reviewed by an Editorial Team composed of experienced academics and practitioners in the investment arbitration field. This process allows lawyers to access up-to-date and verified information that is also both neutral and practical.” (Jus Mundi’s Chief Editor shares her vision about the Wiki Notes project; archived)
“250+ ISDS legal concepts to guide you through the latest and most relevant case law.” (Smart Search for International Law and Arbitration; archived)
Claimed rationale and benefits
- To enable multilingual legal research.
- To provide authoritative summaries of key legal concepts and issues.
- To improve due diligence practice.
“Global legal professionals use Jus Mundi’s AI-powered technology to efficiently deliver thorough legal research and due diligence with full confidence.” (Smart Search for International Law and Arbitration; archived)
“Around 20% of investment arbitration awards are not available in English. Jus Mundi allows you to search for documents in English or French (the two languages that activate our multilingual feature) to receive multilingual results. (About Jus Mundi Search Engine; archived)
“Wiki Notes provide a summary of the key issues arising out of a legal concept, such as the Investment Arbitration & Pandemic, Force Majeure, Denial of Benefits, Indirect Expropriation, Transparency in Fair and Equitable Treatment, and instantly display the way the concept is structured. Wiki Notes are interconnected and contain hyperlinks to other Wiki Notes on related issues. As a result, Wiki Notes is a great time-saving tool for lawyers and academics while conducting legal research on our search engine.” (Jus Mundi’s Chief Editor shares her vision about the Wiki Notes project; archived)
“Wiki Notes are peer-reviewed by an Editorial Team composed of experienced academics and practitioners in the investment arbitration field. This process allows lawyers to access up-to-date and verified information that is also both neutral and practical.” (Jus Mundi’s Chief Editor shares her vision about the Wiki Notes project; archived)
“Wiki Notes allow lawyers & academics to instantly access the most relevant and recent awards on the issues arising out of the concept and display the different approaches followed by tribunals.” (Jus Mundi’s Chief Editor shares her vision about the Wiki Notes project; archived)
”[Conflict Checker] provides a simpler and more efficient due diligence mechanism, thereby mitigating or avoiding conflicts of interest.” (About the Conflict Checker; archived)
Claimed design choices
- Document contents are “structured and qualified” by paragraph.
- Complex queries are possible (exact string, NOT, AND, OR, and NEAR operators).
“Each paragraph of each document is structured and qualified in order to enhance the quality of a search. As a result, the search goes beyond keywords inputted by the user.” (About Jus Mundi Search Engine; archived)
- Conflict Checker identifies both direct and indirect relationships.
“A direct relationship is one between two individuals, an individual and a firm, or an individual and a State involved in the same arbitration case or document.
An indirect relationship means that the law firm (current or former) of an individual in question, or other individuals who have worked or are working for the firm or State in question, have been involved in the same arbitration case.” (Conflict Checker; archived)
“The scope of these relationships [identified by Conflict Checker] is intentionally broader than the notion of conflict of interest: [including both] […] direct relationship, […] indirect relationship …” (Conflict Checker; archived)
Substantiation of claims & potential issues
- If the labels used for text classification are inappropriate, and/or they are applied incorrectly or inconsistently to the training data, the resulting output could be unreliable.
- The system delivers search results that pinpoint what it considers to be the relevant paragraph. As with other search systems, there is a risk that lawyers rely too heavily on the highlighted passages and miss other relevant text.
Jus Mundi provides information about many aspects of its technology and the document sources that constitute the database but there is no single text explaining the workings of all the elements of all its products or providing a detailed exposition of the workflows from collection of the data to output of results. In this section we provide Information about various features:
Data
- Jus Mundi covers commercial arbitration, investment arbitration, international trade law and public international law & Law of the Sea.
Multi-lingual search engine
-
Jus Mundi’s search engine is based on keyword search and has the ability to reinforce or remove stemming.
“If you would like to turn stemming off and thus exclude grammatical variations of your search terms, you may use the exact search feature by clicking on the target icon at the right side of the search bar.” (About Jus Mundi Search Engine; archived). This indicates that the underlying representation is a classic :tf-idf document representation.
-
The claim that they “can look beyond key words” is based on text classification on paragraph level where the paragraphs in a document are tagged with their corresponding legal concepts:
“Our search engine brings you the best results by extracting all relevant legal concepts beyond keywords used from a database of over 2000 cases. Paragraph-by-paragraph qualification of documents in the software developed by our team of legal and IT experts.” (https://www.facebook.com/JusMundicom, 10 October 2018)
-
The underlying technique for the text classification or the list of concepts that are recognised is not known. Related research on different text classification methods published by the Jus Mundi research team (Clavie and Alphonsus, 2021) would indicate that they use :tf-idf representations.
-
The multi-lingual search functionality depends on extraction of concepts from the documents at paragraph level. In videos, Jus Mundi’s CEO Jean-Rémi de Maistre suggests that the system does not employ machine translation. In this video Jean-Rémi de Maistre, CEO and co-founder of Jus Mundi explains:
“… for the interconnection [of data] … we developed an algorithm … to identify the citations into the awards, the decision of the WTO committees and to implement the hyperlinks towards the other documents [audio not clear] … Then when it comes to full text search here the language issue is a real worry … So we consider several possibilities including translating documents … The idea we came with is to extract legal concepts from the documents themselves and to do that at quite granular steps so we of course it is at the level of the paragraph and thanks to that we can start pushing a multilingual search so you search in English and you will find the relevant paragraph of documents that are in Spanish, in French etc …” [transcript of the video] (CEILSS Talk 2 – Toward a New Generation of International Law Databases (12 December 2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYKPUsazGaU).
CiteMap
-
The CiteMap feature allows for citations between documents to be hyperlinked.
-
The technique used to identify and normalise citations is described in (Gheewala et al., 2019). It consists of a text preprocessing step with a system of :regular expression patterns to recognise the citations in different formats.
-
“As a result of running the model on test data, 98.5% of the citations are correctly identified with a :precision of 99.23%.” (Gheewala et al., 2019).
-
The evaluation was carried out by manually checking the recognised links:
“… due to the nature of the task on an unsupervised Database, the method of evaluation of the model involves manual validation. It is important to remember that although such a review is a manual activity, it is a one-time investment of resources to evaluate a small set of data, to achieve the automation for all links on a significantly larger dataset.” (Gheewala et al., 2019).
Jus Connect
- There is no information available on techniques used to extract information for the Jus Connect directory feature. This information could be metadata that is always associated to the documents in the database or extracted by Jus Mundi to populate the database.
Conflict Checker
- There is no information available on the techniques used to distinguish between direct and indirect relationships in the Conflict Checker.
Resources
- Benjamin Clavie and Marc Alphonsus, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Baseline: Discussing SVMs in Legal Text Classification arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.07234 (2021).
- Akshita Gheewala, Chris Turner, and Jean-Rémi de Maistre. 2019. Automatic Extraction of Legal Citations using Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2019). SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda, Setubal, PRT, 202–209. https://doi.org/10.5220/0008052702020209.
How might the end-user assess effectiveness?
Jus Mundi offers a free trial.
It was named as a Top Legal Tech Company in France (2021) by Welp Magazine (These are the Top Legal Tech Companies in France (2021); archived)
Ius Mundi won the Innovation in Publishing Award by The Association Of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) (ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing 2020: Winners announced! ; archived)
Top What form does it take?
Form
Platform
Details
Jus Mundi describe their system as a platform. The services are offered as a ‘standard’ service.
Top The creators
Created by
Legal tech company
Details
Jus Mundi, are “a limited liability company under French law … [its] head office is located 10 rue de Penthièvre 75008 Paris … Jus Mundi is represented by its CEO, Mr. Jean-Rémi de Maistre …” (General Terms of Use; archived)
The company is “a start-up co-founded in 2019” (Jus Mundi raises US$10 million to democratize access to international legal resources; archived). It was founded “by a team of 5 engineers and a lawyer, Jean-Rémi de Maistre …” (Jus Mundi secures €1 million Seed Funding to make International Law and Arbitration easily accessible worldwide; archived)
“Jus Mundi was quick to raise a highly sought-after seed round of €1 million that comes from angel investors from various countries, such as the US, Germany, The Netherlands, UK, Ireland, and Australia besides France. These include several successful entrepreneurs and business angels, namely, Stefan Tietze (founder gebraucht.de), Kai Hansen (founder Lieferando), Cedric Page and Elie Rotenberg (founders Millenium.org and Webedia gaming), Olivier Njamfa (founder Eptica) and leading business angels clubs (INSEAD, Seed4Soft, and Holnest).” (Jus Mundi secures €1 million Seed Funding to make International Law and Arbitration easily accessible worldwide; archived)
“Based in Paris and NYC, Jus Mundi’s turnover comes at 40% from the US and 30% from the UK. Customers include big legal firms such as DLA Piper, Freshfields, Dentons, legal departments of multinationals such as Iberdrola, governments including Japan and the UK, and universities such as the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Cambridge.” https://gt.linkedin.com/company/jus-mundi
The company “has launched a $10 million second round of funding (Series A) led by C4 Ventures, a European Venture Capital fund created by Pascal Cagni, formerly head of Apple Europe from 2000 to 2012.” (Jus Mundi raises US$10 million to democratize access to international legal resources; archived)
Top Jurisdiction
Background of developers
France
Target jurisdiction
Global
Target legal domains
Investment Arbitration, Commercial Arbitration, PIL & Law of the Sea, International Trade Law (Smart Search for International Law and Arbitration; archived)
international law, investment law, international legal research, investment arbitration, and inter-state disputes https://gt.linkedin.com/company/jus-mundi
Jus Mundi has plans to broaden its targeted domains to include the following areas of law: sports, energy, tax, labor, construction, environmental, human rights, data protection, IP, and energy. (Jus Mundi, About Us; archived)
Top License
Jus Mundi does not offer a licence for the code. It asserts that its documents are protected by copyright and database rights. (General Terms of Use; archived)
Top