Developers include Queen’s law students
A student team has pitched Mouthpiece Law, a legal technology platform that aims to reduce the traditional overhead costs for legal practitioners by as much as 50 per cent, at the Collision 2021 Conference.
The team members include three students from Queen’s Faculty of Law: Avinash Pillay, Mouthpiece Law’s chief operating officer and chief legal engineer; Yoonhyun Cho, chief executive officer and chief legal entrepreneur; and Daniel Moholia, chief information officer. Thabo Magubane from the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Pietermaritzburg Law School acts as chief technology officer, said the news release.
Collision is a technology conference with participants including e-commerce companies, social media companies, software companies, start-ups, fintech providers, investors and celebrities. The 2021 conference saw more than 38,000 remote participants.
Mouthpiece Law seeks to offer the general public cost-effective solutions to access legal services through reduced overhead costs, to promote access to justice for traditionally marginalized communities, to help legal practitioners earn more revenue via digitization and to assist the legal community in adapting to the shift in legal delivery models to more data-driven methods.
Pillay and Cho, accepted into the Legal Innovation Zone’s Concept Framework Incubation program which is modeled after Ryerson University’s DMZ program, started collaborating as project leads at the Conflict Analytics Lab, which is based at Queen’s Law and at the Smith School of Business. Now, according to Pillay, the team members have been communicating with angel investors and venture capitalists that they met during Collision.
“The legal technology market is growing rapidly as lawyers begin to realize the cost inefficiencies of antiquated billing and case management software,” said Pillay in the news release. “AI is becoming a buzz word in the law, and [venture capitalists] seem to be increasingly driven to find ethical and ethnically diverse start-ups.”
The team is also developing MyLawyerProfile as one of Mouthpiece Law’s products, which is a virtual networking platform for lawyers and law students to share information such as their resumes, case work, billable rates, thought leadership and areas of experience. The platform seeks to promote professional development, to attract new clients and to reduce fatigue and complacency among legal professionals with the use of gamified engagement elements inspired by blockchain technology.
“Our users can earn unique badges based on their work on our platforms, such as rare badges that are limited quantity and serial-number-based to enhance the resume and job prospects of practitioners and law students,” said Cho.
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The team also plans to offer the Justice World Interface, a virtual environment that aims to allow solo practitioners and law firms to digitize their physical presence. The team likewise announced that it has partnered with Legal Connection, a U.K.-based start-up, to introduce modern case management to the Mouthpiece Law platform.