A Chat With Ben Snape, Commercial Director At AI Legaltech Company Litigated.com

Tell us about Litigated.com

Litigated.com is a vision AI legaltech company set up in collaboration with the University of Salford. The AI vision software allows legal and claims firms to upload huge amounts of information and documents, dissecting them into manageable pieces and creating very detailed reports, valuations, and letters of claim. In theory, it sounds like standard Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. But the software doesn’t just convert text found within images and documents in machine-readable text. It reads poor quality scans, scrawled doctors’ notes, and numerous other types of information that OCR just can’t achieve. As such, it’s saving tens of thousands of pounds and many man-hours for its users each month.

How Did You Come Up With the Idea for Litigated.com?

Litigated.com evolved from another project intended to help council housing tenants to access justice and legal support when things go wrong. The idea was to allow them to upload images of the conditions they were living with – damp, mould, broken fixtures – for analysis and advice on potential legal action. While we were working on that, we came to realise how many lawyers were experiencing bottlenecks in these cases, and similar. They have such a vast amount of defendant-provided information and evidence to work through. Dealing with it is incredibly time-consuming, and small errors can make a dramatic difference to the outcome of a case, if key information is missed. We realised that if we could use and expand upon the Vision AI we’d already produced, we could help to resolve at least some of these problems.

Tell Us About Your Core Product

The core product is Vision AI or YOLOv9. It uses DSAR Intelligence, powered by our proprietary computer vision engine, IntelOptic, which was developed in collaboration with leading UK universities. It can provide KC-level viability analysis and was trained on all 17,500+ Financial Ombudsman decisions, as well as compliance directives. Its role isn’t to replace legal services, but to support them, by scanning data, assessing claims, and drafting documents, ready for professional scrutiny. All data processed locally rather than being added to the cloud to ensure that sensitive case data and other information is kept safe and GDPR requirements are met.

Our software has been peer-reviewed, and scientific papers have been published, covering the proprietary technology.

What Has Been the Biggest Challenge You’ve Had To Overcome?

Information provided by defendants is often intentionally made difficult to read. Photographs of documents, handwritten notes, and poorly scanned records have always been difficult to deal with digitally because you really need human knowledge and understanding to deal with them. So, we had to find a way to train YOLO to learn how to detect and interpret these kinds of files. It was a massive challenge to begin with, but it’s now become our greatest strength because no one else has yet been able to overcome this problem in this context.

What Can We Hope To See from Litigated.com In the Future?

Litigated.com is already being used by a number of large, well-known law firms in the UK and Europe. And that was our first aim: to find professionals willing to not just test our software, but to use and trust it. And we’ve achieved that. So, the next stage is to offer these services to the US market, and hope that we find similar success there.

We’re also in the process of adding new features to the platform, to further support our users. These will include an AI Settlement Modeller, Regulatory Change Monitor, Legal Costs Calculator, and a Multi-Firm Referral Network. Each of these things will be tested and rolled out in the coming year or so. Ultimately, our aim is to provide in-depth support for the legal sector. Helping them to maximise the potential of AI without compromising security or client confidentiality.