Rooka

Powering the next generation of legal drafting

26 Jun

Product

AI is coming for the law profession, again…

Let’s be honest, AI has often failed to live up to our expectations.

Significant inroads have been made in legal research and reviewing documents for litigation. However, we can agree that AI will not eliminate the need for lawyers since their expertise and counsel remain hard to replicate.

So what’s different this time?

Law is inherently a profession of words. Past tools have not been impressive due to their lack of accurate language processing but GPT-4 provides a strong signal to noise ratio of 8/10. This is still not great in a profession where the 2/10 inaccuracy can be very costly, but enough to start trialling different use cases.

Industry professionals also recognise the power of technology, drawing parallels to a “smart paralegal” when describing the current state of legal tech.

Rooka leverages AI to superpower the legal drafting process.

Augment - See instant suggestions and variations to inspire legal drafting

Error - Catch context-specific legal drafting errors

Track - Stay consistent with definitions, past wording and external company data etc.

Founders

Richie Lo, Co-Founder - Currently senior research engineer at Dyson and AI researcher at Shell. MSc - Computer Science, University of Oxford

Jan Kubica, Co-Founder - Previously legal trainee at Moore Legal CZ and intern at Allen and Overy. MJur - Magister Juris, University of Oxford

Spotlight Analysis

Strengths

  • Multi-lingual: tapping into a large, underserved market through supporting 28+ languages acts as a strong wedge

  • Tech approach: leveraging a range of different ML models, as well as using its own local models, helps to achieve optimal results and mitigate platform risk

  • Market timing: with AI at the forefront of C-level executives’ agendas, this is the perfect time to start a dialogue with enterprise customers

Weaknesses

  • Data protection: firms are wary of transmitting sensitive client data and typically avoid using opaque third party models

  • Explainability: current models lack the ability to explain the origin of their answers and could benefit from legitimate references

Market

Casetext - Raised $25m Series C from SSV, BuildGroup and others in January 2022

Spellbook - Raised $10.9m from Moxxie Ventures and others in May 2023

The market also has a number of small players specific to different geographies and focused on impacting different legal workflows.

Why Rooka?

Combine the best MJur performer in their cohort at Oxford with a tech-savvy AI researcher, and you have an ideal team which is best placed to exploit interesting LLM use cases in the legal sphere.

Key Details

Year founded: 2023

Summary: Rooka leverages AI to superpower the legal drafting process.

Raised to date: Bootstrapped

Currently raising?: Yes, £500,000

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