Today marks the formal launch of Gatewai, a new legal tech company dedicated to legal professionals and committed to making justice more accessible to everyone.

In this first post, we share with you the reasons and values grounding our project, and provide a glimpse of what Gatewai proposes, and will propose in the coming weeks, months, and years, to address the challenges posed by the emergence of the legal AI age.

Accessible justice for all

The pursuit of equal access to justice, and equal justice under law, lies at the foundation of our democracies.

Immense progress has been made over the past centuries, a testament to the tireless work of dedicated legal practitioners who have fought and keep fighting every day to make this ideal a reality.

Yet, despite remarkable achievements, the quest for truly equal and accessible justice remains incomplete.

For many, access to justice is still a chimera. Financial constraints, lack of time or education making it impossible to grasp the sheer complexity of the rules of law, and many other reasons, keep them away from the protection of our judicial institutions.

For those who are privileged enough to have access to a functional legal system, the experience is quite often a bitter one: Inefficiency, unbearable costs, never-ending procedures, unpredictability… The prevalence of biases, whether social, psychological, or financial further adds to the overall feeling that justice remains the prerogative of the wealthiest (even though the wealthiest also suffer from the system’s flaws).

The persistence of these difficulties threatens the very foundations of our democracies.

“Legal professionals should be given the full material support to focus on what truly matters.”

Legal professionals, particularly attorneys at law, are the first to suffer from this situation. While their primary role is to protect people and ensure that justice prevails for their clients, they actually often find themselves spending more time fighting the flaws of the system itself: Ever-growing volume of low-quality legislation and regulations; hurdles of judicial administrations poised by inefficiency and reluctance to technological progress, market competition and financial realities that can force practitioners and firms to settle for lesser quality than what they had wished to offer.

This situation not only hinders legal professionals’ ability to provide effective legal representation but also often detracts them from their primary role as justice auxiliaries.

Legal professionals should not only be praised for what they do every day in support of justice. They should be given the full material support they need to focus on that endeavor.

Providing this support is the core of Gatewai’s mission.

Technology at the service of Justice

We believe that the recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer a formidable opportunity for more accessible and more equal justice.

By automating routine and time-consuming tasks, and streamlining legal processes, new AI-driven tools will let legal professionals focus on more critical aspects of their work, such as developing legal strategies, advising clients, and advocating.

AI-powered legal research tools will provide better access to legal information, enabling legal professionals to form better opinions on legal matters. This increased access to information will help level the playing field for smaller law firms and independent practitioners, who may not have the same resources as larger firms. It will also, ultimately, help bridge the knowledge gap between legal professionals and the rest of the population and will empower individuals to navigate the legal system with greater confidence and autonomy.

AI technologies will also likely contribute to more transparency, more predictability, and will help identify – and reduce – human biases at play at every level of the legal system, thereby participating in a justice that is administered more fairly and impartially.

We are firmly convinced that, if used properly, these new technologies will help achieve tremendous progress in our quest for a more accessible and equal judicial system.

“There can be no justice without the absolute respect of legal privilege”

AI and legal practitioners

While AI offers numerous benefits, including increased efficiency and cost saving, it is crucial for legal practitioners to acknowledge the flaws and dangers associated with this still relatively new technology. These dangers have been pointed out by many observers; they are very real and must be addressed seriously.

One of the primary concerns regards privacy and confidentiality.

There can be no justice without the absolute respect of legal privilege and of the confidentiality of attorney-client communications.

To be fully performant, AI systems require access to certain data, which users may provide despite having no clear understanding of the technology at stake, and without measuring the risks of disclosing confidential information to these systems. Few users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, are aware of the company’s terms on the use of their data for training purposes.

Legal practitioners must therefore exercise extreme caution when using AI-driven services, and learn precisely how the technology works, to ensure that client information, and legal privilege, are safeguarded.

Another concern regards the reliability and accuracy of the information provided with this new technology.

Current AI systems are prone to substantial inaccuracies or biases, raising obvious questions about liability and accountability, particularly when AI-generated advice or decisions lead to negative outcomes for clients. Legal practitioners must be prepared to address these concerns and establish clear lines of responsibility when using AI tools in their practice.

“AI technologies represent not only a promise of increased productivity, but a profound change of our society”

Last but not least, while AI is not meant to replace legal practitioners, the increasing reliance on AI in legal practice will inevitably lead to a reduction in demand for certain legal skills and job roles and will raise fundamental questions about the ways young practitioners are trained, and how they will do the job in their work in the future. These are very complex issues that cannot be disregarded, and we should not hide away from them.

AI technologies do not only represent a promise of increased efficiency and productivity – which should be welcomed by legal practitioners. They will trigger a profound societal change that will have unimaginable consequences on all aspects of our personal and professional lives.

This ongoing revolution requires total engagement from legal practitioners, to ensure that the technology is not used at the detriment of civil liberties and fundamental rights, and, at the very least, that they remain able to serve their clients and serve justice as they have done for centuries.

Assisting legal practitioners in this endeavor is the main reason for which we have created Gatewai.

Gatewai’s mission is to accompany legal practitioners as they show us a way through the many challenges our society is about to face, and to help them do what they have been instrumental to in the past centuries: making justice fairer and more accessible to all.

Gatewai: Pioneering a new era of legal efficiency and equal access to justice

With that in mind, it is now time to introduce you to Gatewai.

Gatewai is a legal tech company that provides powerful AI-powered solutions and training to all legal practitioners, by increasing their performance and enhancing their expertise while preserving their singularity as they transition into a new era of justice.

Humbly, but firmly, we are working so that Gatewai can be a positive contribution to making justice more accessible, and more equal, to all.

“An unparalleled alliance of expertise and knowledge”

At the heart of Gatewai lies an unparalleled alliance of expertise and knowledge.

Founded by an international dispute resolution lawyer with 15 years of experience in big law firms, and an experienced engineer, Ph.D. in AI, and successful entrepreneur, Gatewai brings together a team of exceptional talents coming from the legal, AI, computer science, and cyber security fields, to create the most advanced products and services available on the market.

With this configuration, Gatewai’s team is ready to tackle all challenges posed by legal AI technologies, ranging from the most prosaic to the most conceptual ones, to relieve legal professionals from the burden of the most meaningless, time-consuming, tasks, and enable them to focus on what truly matters to them: serving their client and justice to the best possible level.

Concretely, Gatewai is :

• A team of legal and AI experts dedicated to accompanying, in the long term, legal practitioners and law firms in their transition to the new legal AI age;
• A centralized and secured interface that provides confidential access to all relevant AI technologies useful for legal practitioners, based on the best available models (not just ChatGPT);
• Advanced in-house designed legal AI solutions that can be used either with Gatewai’s secured interface or in connection with other tools already used by our clients;
• The development of singular generative AIs, securely trained on firms‘ data to be used at their full potential;
• Continuous support and regular training courses offered to all legal practitioners on all relevant issues regarding legal AI matters.

Gatewai is not only committed to offering disruptive, cutting-edge, technology to its clients, but it is also re-imagining the digital work environment for lawyers, and shaping the future of legal AI.

By harnessing the full potential of AI and fostering seamless software integration, Gatewai aims to create genuine legal productivity tools that deliver accurate, trustworthy, efficient, and substantiated legal information.

Above all, Gatewai is a human-driven project: a team of people dedicated to helping people committed to justice, to offer ever-better services to their clients and to society.

The name of our company reflects this double ambition : (i) creating a secured interface to access all AI services in a way that is fully compliant with the higher professional and ethical standards applicable to legal professionals, and (ii) opening the door to the promise of a better, more efficient, more equal, judicial system.

We hope very much that you will join us on this exciting journey as we embark on a new era of legal innovation, driven by the power of collaboration, technology, and a steadfast commitment to excellence.

Paul Lefeuvre, Attorney at law, CEO & Co-founder

Didier Marin PhD, AI Engineer, CTO & Co-founder

We will post regularly on this website, as well as on Gatewai’s social media, to update you on all relevant issues relating to legal AI matters.

If you are interested in testing our AI solutions, being accompanied in your transition to AI, or organizing one of our training sessions on legal AI, please contact our team at contact@gatewai.tech

If you would like to follow our endeavor, support our project, or simply be informed of the latest development of legal AI and their impact on the legal professional community, please consider subscribing to our newsletter.

And if you are a legal or AI professional interested in joining our team, please do not hesitate to submit your application on our dedicated career page.