Show HN: We built the first legal AI API

Hey HN,

Over the past couple months, we, a team of Aussie legal and AI experts, have been working on building a new type of legal AI company — a company that, instead of trying to automate legal jobs, is trying to automate legal tasks.

We want to make lawyers’ lives easier, not replace them.

We’ve been laser-focused on building small and efficient yet still highly accurate, specialized models for some of the most time-consuming and mundane legal tasks lawyers have to perform. Stuff like running through a thousand contracts just to locate any clauses that would allow you to get out early.

We just finished training our first set of models, focused on document and clause classification, probably the most common problem we see come up. Our benchmarks show our models to be far more accurate and almost more efficient than their closest general-purpose competitors.

Today, we’re making those models publicly available via the Isaacus API, the world’s first legal AI API.

Our models don’t require any finetuning because they’re zero-shot classifiers — you give them a description of what you’re looking for (for example, “This is a confidentiality clause.”) and they pop out a classification score.

Because our models are so small, which they have to be to be able to process reams of legal data at scale, they can sometimes be a bit sensitive to prompts. To help with that, however, we’ve preoptimized an entire library of prompts, including what we call, universal templates, which let you plug in your own arbitrary descriptions of what you’ve looking for.

We’ve made our prompt library available via the Isaacus Query Language or IQL. Another world first — it’s a brand-new AI query language designed specifically for using AI models to analyze documents.

You can invoke query templates using the format “{IS <query_template_name>}”. You can also chain queries together using Boolean and mathematical operators, like so: “{This is a confidentiality clause.} AND {IS unilateral clause}”.

We think our API is pretty neat and we hope you will too.

This is just the beginning for us — over the course of this year, we’re planning on releasing text extraction and embedding models as well as a second generation of our Kanon legal foundational model.

Below are some links for your convenience.

- Quickstart guide: https://docs.isaacus.com/quickstart

- Announcement: https://isaacus.com/blog/the-worlds-first-legal-ai-api

- Docs: https://docs.isaacus.com/home

- Sign up: https://platform.isaacus.com/accounts/signup/

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/isaacus/

- Email: hello@isaacus.com