vLex has been getting a lot of buzz for launching a “drop and drag” research assistant to compete with Casetext’s CARA and Ross’s Eva. Yes vLex has launched an AI enabled research assistant called Vincent which has similarities to the competitors. Vincent is the ONLY “legal assistant” that works in multiple languages.  International legal research remains a challenge in an increasingly globalized legal market. Very few products allow researchers to conduct research in English and get results in both English and the native language of a foreign document.  vLex is very complex product and it is important to distinguish between the vLex product and the Vincent functionality. vLex includes primary law for twenty countries which is a  significant differentiator as it enters the U.S. market.

Vincent

Vincent is currently trained on the law of  9 countries which allows it to recognize  citations and assign topics. Additional countries will be added as Vincent is trained on the remaining 11 countries where vLex has comprehensive or near-comprehensive coverage of primary law.

Vincent can be launched by loading either a document or a link to a public document.

Users can control the results by using contextual filters such as topics, authorities’ similar documents and semantics similarity you can also use keywords to focus.

Vincent offers users more editorial control and filters than competitors.

Vincent Filters

 vLex

Can translate  a query into 13 languages. to find results from documents published in one of those languages, and the results list present matches in the user’s operating language along with the option of switching between operating and original language at a document-by-document basis.

One of the most interesting features is the ability to locate foreign laws on a topic and to see the text of laws side-by-side in both English and the original language.

vLex provies “strength of treatment signals” and negative history treatment from Casemaker

Unlike the vast majority of legal vendors vLex will license their software to law firms and it can be used as SaaS platforms and APIs.

vLex is loaded with unique features – too numerous to highlight in this post.

vLex Global Footprint

vLex – the back story

vLex began in Spain in the late 90s. No surprise – it was started by a lawyer who thought “there has to be a better way” and a technologist who could built a solution. The lawyer was Lluís Faus and the technologist was his brother Angel, a mathematician. In the past  20 years  vLex  has built up a market in Spain, southern Europe and Latin America, and provides  foreign and international law in the North American academic market.    The vLex  Content collections, are obtained directly from sources or through licensing and  now exceed 110,000,000 documents. vLex has comprehensive primary law coverage in 20 jurisdictions, the largest coverage of any provider in Latin Americas and important selections of national level primary law and valuable secondary source materials from over 100 countries in total. In its original market Spain , vLex has as broad a suite of offerings which includes dozens of specialty collections (e.g., Tax, labor, criminal, etc….), practice management platformscourt analytics, litigation workflow tools (virtual paralegal) and practical law tools..

U.S. coverage, which includes 12M federal and state primary law documents (all federal and state codes and caselaw) and 8M secondary source, has mostly been focused on serving global client interest in U.S. materials. Canadian  materials including all cases and statutes for both provinces and national law. have also been added in the past two years. With the release of Vincent, vLex is now,  ready to position itself as domestic competitor in the United States market. Although they will focus on the large law firm market they offer options for solo and small firms  without Vincent – for  $79/month).

A few years ago, vLex undertook a project to develop a completely new back-end for its content collection, management and publishing process. The size and complexity of the vLex’s  data which is ingested from over 2,000 different sources, in multiple languages, jurisdictions, document types compounded the challenges of operating efficiently and continually scaling up the platform. The solution was the development of the Iceberg platform. According to  Colin Lachance, CEO vLex Canada, Iceberg would not only support vLex’s own operations, “but was designed to be made available as an enterprise SaaS platform that could unbundle and put vLex’s tools, AI models and even its content in the hands of organizations with a vision for legal information management and analysis that can’t be satisfied by closed systems.” Iceberg enabled vLex to develop Vincent in less than six months.

Sign up for a free trial of vLex at this link.

 

Organizations interested in a trial of Vincent can request access here.