A Semantic Search solution to find what you didn’t know was there in the judgment

How will Lex-Liberalis help you in reading judgments?

Legal Tech, AI  · 

Link to the web-app (click here)

Part I – The problem

You have a pleading to draft. You have your issues on points of law and fact framed, and your go to option for searching for caselaw is fired up and ready. You type in the query in the search bar, set whichever filters you wanted, and proceed to go through the results.

The problem here is there are HUNDREDS (if not thousands) of judgments in the results!

This will take you ages if you had to search for the precise set of facts or legal propositions.

Part II – The solution

So you have a list of case laws already right? And you can find their IndianKanoon URLs? Here’s where things get simpler than ever before, thanks to Lex Liberalis.

You just make a list of those IndianKanoon URLs, separated by a space each – something like this (where docid is replaced by an actual document ID)

https://indiankanoon.org/doc/<docid1>, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/<docid2>, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/<docid3>, ... https://indiankanoon.org/doc/<docid10>

After that, it’s as simple as typing what phrases you expect to be used by the judges when discovering the text actually used in your list of judgments. The search results are ranked on the basis of similarity in meaning!

Part III – Why it’s optimal

Semantic Search works better than any previous kind of search because you are NOT limited by what you know! You will get results for whatever terms you use to describe.

Try it yourself – search for “seclusion” in the Right to Privacy and Aadhar judgments loaded in the preview – https://lex-liberalis.onrender.com/preview. You’ll get results that broadly match the criteria – isolation, solitude, dignity, and yes even privacy.

Final thoughts

This is just a rough build that will get better as time passes. That means more models for embeddings, better UI, and hopefully more options and filters on the basis of feedback. Oh, and did I mention it’s completely Free and Open Source. Heck, currently, it’s even free in terms of free beer, not just freedom. What are you waiting for? Grab that six pack!