Blawx is a drag-and-drop tool for digitizing legal knowledge. It allows non-programmers to build an artificial intelligence capable of both deductive and analogical reasoning. A web application programming interface (API) then allows you to securely send information and questions to your AI from any web-enabled application. Your AI responds with answers, and explanations for how it got those answers.
Blawx is accessible over web-based API, making it possible to add legal artificial intelligence to any number of existing systems. It also integrates with existing semantic web ontologies.
Logic programming is one of the first forms of artificial intelligence, and deductive reasoning is the backbone of Blawx. Blawx allows you to restate the law, or your understanding of the law, in terms of logical rules. Blawx can then use these rules and what it knows about your fact scenario to generate conclusions and explanations.
The law is rife with exceptions. Laws are written with exceptions for efficiency of drafting. But most logic programming tools do not allow for rules that override other rules. As a result, in most logical programming tools an exception must be placed inside all of the rules which it overrides. This makes the relationship between the original law and the encoded law less clear. It also makes the encoded law longer, and it makes the encoded law harder to maintain.
The ability of one logical rule to override the conclusion of another logical rule is called "defeasibility." Blawx implements defeasible reasoning, allowing you to write exceptions in Blawx the same way they are written in laws. This makes writing and maintaining your encoded rules easier.
Very frequently automated legal systems run into situations in which deductive reasoning is not enough. These include any situations in which "reasonableness" becomes an issue, a legal conclusion is decided subjectively, or the law calls for consideration of "all other relevant factors." Existing legal knowledge automation systems typically cannot address these situations. Instead, a human expert will make a prediction based on analogy to prior cases.
Blawx uses some of the latest advancements in argumentation theory to allow you to encode your analogical reasoning strategy for an open-textured legal question. Your AI will then be able to generate a prediction using your hypothetical scenario and an annotated database of relevant cases.
This feature makes a much wider array of legal questions possible to automate.
Blawx allows you to place your legal knowledge in re-usable modules. Your encoding of legal knowledge can be separated from the tools that use that knowledge, making it re-usable. For example, you could encode a piece of legislation in one module, and then use that module to build two different tools capable of answering two different questions. If the legislation changes, you can modify your module, and all of the tools which rely on that legislation will automatically know and apply the new rules.
Blawx is aimed at people who already know legal rules, not people who already know code. Blawx uses a proprietary extension to Google's Blockly, a web-based drag and drop programming interface, to allow you to build your legal AI without writing code.
Jason Morris is a lawyer in Alberta, Canada, and an LLM candidate in Computational Law at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law and Department of Computing Science. He is a founder of Legal Hackers Edmonton, and has been invited to speak on law and technology by the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, the Legal Education Society of Alberta, and TEDxUAlberta. He was named an ABA Innovation Fellow for 2018/2019 by the American Bar Association Center for Innovation.
Blawx is looking for ground-level business partners interested in changing the face of legal services automation. If you are interested in discussing opportunities, please fill out the form below.
Blawx is currently in the early startup phases. If you're interested in getting a free trial and helping us work out the bugs once there is a limited beta release, please fill out the form below, and we'll be in touch.