Tuesday 4 August 2020

Spotlight on Jus Mundi - shortlisted for the 2020 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing

The judges have selected a shortlist of eight for this year's ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing.  The winners will be announced on 16 September at the opening of the ALPSP 2020 Virtual Conference. In this series, we learn more about the finalists.

In this post, we hear from Jean-Rémi de Maistre, CEO & Co-founder of Jus Mundi. 

Tell us a bit about your organization.

logo Jus Mundi The Search Engine for International Law and Arbitration
Paris-based Jus Mundi strives to make International Law & Arbitration easily accessible and understandable to lawyers worldwide. We built a multilingual search engine by publishing the most comprehensive international legal database. We collect and structure global legal data that is otherwise dispersed across multiple restrictive sources or simply not available. Our intuitive, user-friendly interface powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning allows lawyers to do their research quickly and efficiently with legal filters.  We partnered with Brill to distribute Jus Mundi to academics. Jus Mundi is featured on Forbes Top Machine Learning Startups in 2020.

What are the main features of Jus Mundi?

Unique Content: Jus Mundi offers the most comprehensive collection document of public international law, investment arbitration, commercial arbitration, international trade law, international economic law, law of the sea. All documents are interactive. The text has been extracted from the original PDF version (including poor quality scanned copies), manually corrected, automatically structured by paragraph or page with an interactive table of content, and enriched with keywords. 

Multilingual Search Engine: When a legal query is entered in English or French, the search engine finds relevant results in all languages available in the database. Searching on Jus Mundi is more comprehensive and relevant due to the quality of the documents.

screenshot multilingual search engine

 
CiteMap: Our innovative feature CiteMap is developed with an algorithm that presents the list of relevant case law on our database in multiple languages for a particular paragraph of a document when you hover the cursor.

graphic Citemap

 
Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

As we cater to the international market, we ensured that the company’s strategies align with it. Today, we are proud to say that we have 11 different nationalities from all around the world. We have data scientists, engineers, web designers, and of course, lawyers. Our team adapted quickly during the times of COVID19 as we were already working remotely pretty regularly. We also onboarded a few recruits online to adapt to the situation.

Alain Pellet, one of the most recognized lawyers in international law, advised us on the legal data part since the beginning, and we are grateful for his help all along.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

Our solution is innovative because it combines advanced technologies, such as machine learning & artificial intelligence, with collaborative human intelligence. Recently we published commercial arbitration awards that are exclusively available on our website. We have developed an algorithm that explores worldwide case laws to extract the relevant international legal data (for instance, international awards) for our users. Our database is updated weekly, so the lawyers are always up to date with their legal knowledge. Our solution is significant because we are filling up the current gap between the dispersed legal data and lawyers who are looking to access this data by providing them on our platform. Thanks to our search engine, lawyers and students can extract essential information from legal documents in a few clicks.

We are also offering easy accessibility to our data, e.g. Jus Mundi’s Wiki Notes — a directory of concept notes published by lawyers globally - are accessible freely without requiring an account.

What are your plans for the future?

Jus Mundi's ambition is to make the entire body of international law accessible. Therefore, we are going to extend to all other areas of international law (human rights, the environment, international criminal law, private international law, etc.). We also plan to make our platform available in Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian.
We have also started working with "traditional" publishers, such as our partner Brill, to index their content and interconnect it with the Jus Mundi database. There are a vast number of books and articles in international law that are produced all over the world. The problem is that it is very challenging for researchers to find what they need quickly. The specific algorithms developed by Jus Mundi can meet this need.





Jean-Rémi de Maistre is CEO & Co-founder of Jus Mundi and has practised for several years as a lawyer in international law. 




Twitter: @JusMundi

You can hear from all of the Finalists at the ALPSP Awards Lightning Session on Tuesday 8 September. Visit the ALPSP website to register and for full details of the ALPSP Virtual Conference and Awards 2020.

The 2020 ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing are sponsored by PLS.


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