Stealth proof of concept brings together legal powerhouses and GenAI legaltech Josef Q

On November 16th, leading legal automation platform Josef announced the launch of its GenAI tool Josef Q – and the end of its private proof of concept – with an event in New York City, with speakers from EY, Orrick and NYU.

Josef was first to market with Josef Q earlier this year, introducing legal and compliance teams to the idea of transforming expertise into digital Q&A tools using generative AI. 

Following a public beta, Josef has spent the last 6 months researching, developing, and testing in a private proof of concept with legal powerhouses like Orrick, Wilson Sonsini’s SixFifty, Gunderson Dettmer, New York University and Cornell Law, and in-house teams at global corporates like Bupa, Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Axel Springer, esports company Fnatic, and London fintech Liberis.

Sam Flynn, COO and Co-Founder, says: “There is so much confusion out there. This proof of concept is unique, enabling Josef and our partners to learn from one another in an open environment.”

“We’ve spent 6 months learning how this transformative technology can actually deliver value today. The biggest opportunity that GenAI can help with? Clients and business don’t engage with complex but important legal and compliance content. This causes all sorts of problems, like junior lawyers spending up to 20% of their day answering FAQs, or businesses failing to comply with important regulations.”

Participants in the proof of concept built and deployed tools across Legal, Compliance, Privacy & Data, HR, Legal Operations, Tax and more. The use cases included tools that:

• provide automated guidance on landlord-tenant laws in Ithaca and New York City; 
• help customer-facing teams in a Financial Services Company to identify and deal with vulnerable customers in accordance with regulatory requirements; and
• answer questions on new tax laws and regulations, including the Inflation Reduction Act.

CEO and co-founder Tom Dreyfus says that Josef Q combines one of LLMs’ most powerful capabilities – summarization – with proprietary features like pre-processing, unrivaled human-in-the-loop training and moderation, and end-user interface design elements including source display and answer rating.

“These unique features,” Dreyfus says, “alongside integrations with the Office 365 environment and the practices we’ve developed – like our Reliability Assessment Framework – means that the tool is ready to go for Legal and Compliance teams. Generic tools might get you 50-60% of the way there, but you need more if you want to deliver real value in these high-risk environments.”

Marketing content reviews at Bupa

Global insurance giant Bupa’s first GenAI tool on Josef Q helps the Marketing Team understand regulatory requirements for health insurance advertising. Claire Nuske, Head of Legal Operations, says that the tool won’t just save time because the legal team no longer has to answer FAQs. “It will also help ensure a smoother and more timely review process [for marketing materials]. This will help get us on the same page early on and help reduce the number of reviews a particular campaign needs to go through,” she said.

The Bupa team would not have been able to launch a tool like this using traditional automation technologies, which would have taken too long to build. For Claire, the difference is the speed of adoption. On why they chose Josef Q, Claire says: “This technology is so easy to use and helps make your everyday work life more seamless.”

Tax law at Orrick

Vedika Mehera, Director of Orrick Labs, says: “We began exploring integrating GenAI into client solutions early this year … . One great example is self-service and repeatable advice – the kind that doesn’t always require a conversation or is needed in real-time.” The first prototype developed by Orrick, and in testing with lawyers, provides automated tax guidance on the Inflation Reduction Act.

Vedika says, “Imagine layering a Q&A-type experience onto databases of knowledge or large volumes of content that you often receive (or want to receive) from your counsel and, instead of FAQs, you can query the content for any question you want to find an answer to within it,” Vedika says. “This is a simple, yet profoundly different client experience.”

Wendy Butler Curtis, Chief Innovation Officer at Orrick, says: “[Josef] is incredibly thoughtful and responsive to what the market needs. Their strategy around Josef Q is a testament to this – while organizations are starting to build their own chatbot and other solutions using LLMs, there is still room for Josef Q in a tech stack that contemplates putting the ability to build GenAI-powered solutions into the hands of lawyers.”

Outside Counsel management at Ferring Pharmaceuticals

Swiss pharmaceutical company Ferring Pharmaceuticals has built tools on Josef Q that will help the legal team navigate billing processes, and identify the right outside counsel for different matters around the world.

Sheila Dusseau, Head of Global Legal Operations, says the reason for turning to generative AI is that, “we’ve struggled with how to get the legal team that information at the snap of their fingers. When we first saw Josef Q, I thought: ‘If this technology can help us put an interface between the big, ugly database and the people who need that information, that would be a great step forward.’”

Catherine Thomsen, Legal Operations Specialist at Ferring, says of generative AI: “Everything about it surprised me – it was completely mind-blowing. There are so many things that we can do, and so many things we can apply the technology to. It’s going to completely change the landscape.” 

The value of the tool to the team is twofold, says Dusseau: “Decreasing the amount of time [the Legal Operations team] already spends answering those questions, and the opportunity cost – increasing the amount of engagement with these resources for people who don’t use it today,” says Dusseau.

Legal education at NYU and Cornell

Sateesh Nori, Adjunct Professor at NYU Law and Advisor at Cornell Tech, has brought GenAI and Josef Q into the law school and legal aid worlds, where his law students have helped develop pro bono tools that can provide guidance on tenants’ rights in New York City. 

Sateesh says: “Legal education is facing irrelevance and obsolescence. In the near future, lawyers will need to use AI to be minimally competent. The legal profession also has a moral obligation to reduce the barriers to justice, and that spirit must begin in law schools. Josef Q represents the bulldozer, breaking down the walls between the general public and critical legal information.”

Vulnerable customer regulations at Liberis

Alexis Alexander is Chief Legal and Compliance Officer of global embedded finance fintech Liberis, has been using automation in her function for years. She is now using Josef Q to help customer-facing teams understand and navigate vulnerable customer policy and requirements, critical for any financial services company. Alexander says of the tool: 

“I thought, ‘There’s no way this thing can think like I do’. But GenAI does get it right most of the time, and I actually trust it.“

The next tool for Liberis, which will help the team figure out how to properly execute contracts, doesn’t just provide efficiency gains for the team. Alexander says: “There is a bigger piece around value, which is the cost of getting it wrong. If you don’t read these policies, and the wrong person signs the contract, then it’s not enforceable. You can actually put a monetary value on that.”

Alexander chose Josef Q because they had already built contract and workflow automation tools on Josef’s no-code platform. “Our function is incredibly proud of those automation tools – the whole business admires them! Because we knew how good Josef was, when we had a need for GenAI, we didn’t look elsewhere.”

Employment and Labor FAQs at Gunderson

Joe Green, Chief Innovation Officer at Gunderson Dettmer, has been leading the GenAI conversation for law firms. The firm has built Josef Q bots that respond to frequently asked questions on behalf of the Employment & Labor Group.

Joe says, “we believe GenAI will transform the way all knowledge professionals work, but that we’re at the very beginning of this transformation. That is why we’ve prioritized providing our attorneys with secure GenAI tools that allow them to experiment with use cases and begin learning how to best leverage the technology to better serve our clients.”

On Josef Q, he says, “we’re excited by the possibilities now that GenAI capabilities are becoming increasingly accessible and embedded in no/low-code solutions that allow law firms to build more tailored solutions in-house. This allows us to better leverage our non-technical subject-matter experts to solve bespoke problems that may never warrant a third-party product offering.”

Consumer and tenants’ law at Wilson Sonsini’s SixFifty

Ransom Wydner, Vice President, Pro Bono and Social Impact, at Wilson Sonsini’s tech subsidiary SixFifty, has been exploring how to deploy Josef Q to help answer common legal questions.

Using Josef Q was easier than Wydner thought it would be. “I grabbed something off the State Attorney-General’s website about tenant rights, and in a couple of minutes I was able to create something that answered my questions. That was when I realized that it wasn’t just cool technology – you can make really impactful tools with GenAI.”

Sports player management at Fnatic

Esports company Fnatic has built a tool on Josef Q that can answer questions about their standard Pro Agreement and Handbook, which governs relationships between Fnatic and its valuable esports players.

“This kind of tool can empower the business and free up the time of my juniors, who spend around 10-20% of their time answering FAQs. We prepare short form guidance notes on common questions, but these are often overlooked or become out of date,” says Laura Ashworth-Cape, Head of Legal. 

For a scaleup like Fnatic, Ashworth-Cape wants her team focusing on strategy and risk, rather than simple contract analysis. “I want the legal team focusing its efforts on the risk analysis, rather than just the text,” she says.

About Josef

Josef is a no-code and GenAI automation platform that transforms the way legal teams work, empowering them to create digital tools that automate the mundane. Josef is used by the world’s best law firms and in-house legal teams, from Clifford Chance to L’Oreal, because it is the fastest and easiest way of automating legal work, empowering lawyers to save time, scale services, and delight clients.