Karan Kalia, Founder of Indian legal tech startup LegitQuest, Speaks at Key UN-Backed Panel on Judicial Integrity in Doha; Says Legal Tech Sector is Set to Transform Legal Processes
New Delhi, March 2020: Lawyer-entrepreneur and founder of Indian AI-based legal startup LegitQuest, Mr. Karan Kalia spoke about the significant potential of using new age technology to redefine legal processes and law education at a prestigious international forum of a key United Nations-backed panel. Karan, the only private sector representative from across the world to speak at the esteemed platform underlined that the legal tech sector had gained steamed in the past two years and is set to transform judicial processes completely.
The High-Level Meeting of the Global Judicial Integrity Network “Past, Present, Future” is being held in Doha, Qatar from February 24 to 27. The Global Judicial Integrity Network, a panel resulting from the initiatives of UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime), assists judiciaries in strengthening judicial integrity and preventing corruption in the justice system through a series of efforts.
Karan was invited to share his views before a distinguished gathering of judicial representatives, jurists, senior judges, lawyers and policy makers from across the globe as part of a panel discussion at the meet. He spoke on the pertinent subject of using technology and algorithms to improve the reach, quality and impact of legal education.
Justice Madan. B. Lokur (Retd) judge of the Supreme Court of India, currently the judge of the Fiji Supreme Court was also amongst the Panelists at the discussion in the capacity of the President of the Commonwealth Judicial Education Institute. However, there was no participant from the Indian judiciary.
“With the penetration of technology in every sphere of life, greater intersections are emerging today between law and technology. The Legal Tech space is in a fledgling stage but looks immensely promising with the sector attracting record investments in the past two years. Elements of quantitative analysis and predictive algorithms are becoming increasingly important for all stakeholders of judicial systems as they try to make legal processes more effective, efficient and swifter. New age technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are already transforming legal processes including legal research. As a startup, our focus has been on leveraging artificial intelligence to create effective tools that make legal research swifter, easier and more effective. We are also working towards finding AI-based solutions to improve multiple other aspects of the judicial system,” said Mr. Kalia, CEO & Founder of LegitQuest.
Karan acquired his LLB degree from Delhi University and went on to attain a Masters degree in Law from the University of Pennsylvania. It was during his time at UPenn that Karan realized that there was significant room for improvement when it came to research on case laws in India. He decided to work on a tool that leverages artificial intelligence to let users sift through millions of digitized legal records and get the most relevant results within seconds.
Before acquiring a Master’s degree and moving on to start his legal tech venture along with a few like-minded people, Karan also spent several years working as a Junior Associate with veteran lawyer Mr. Ram Jethmalani.
About LegitQuest
Founded in 2017, LegitQuest is a legal tech venture that aims to revolutionize legal research by building a reliable and comprehensive online legal database and refurbishing centuries-old unorganised and unstructured legal data with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics so that users can browse millions of records to get the most relevant results within seconds.
The venture is helmed by LQ promoters Karan Kalia, Rohit Shukla and Himanshu Puri who lead a versatile team of tech-savvy attorneys, engineers and designers driven by the objective of transforming the legal research mechanism in India and becoming a one-stop solution for the legal fraternity.
LegitQuest secured a seed funding of Rs 3 crore from Internet firm Infoedge India and venture capital fund WaterBridge Ventures.
The New Delhi-based company has built a unique search feature (iDraf) that uses natural language processing and deep learning to cull out relevant case histories, decisions, reasonings, arguments and facts of all judgments passed by the Supreme Court of India since 1950.
LQ’s media feature called Publish provides news related to the courts and laws, articles and columns written by stakeholders of the justice system as well as interviews with lawyers and judges. The organization enjoyed the patronage and support of eminent jurist Mr. Ram Jethmalani who was an advisor and mentor of the company. Now, Hon’ble Justice (retd) M B Lokur and Hon’ble Justice (retd) A K Sikri are on LQ’s national advisory board.