Assessing fairness at the touch of a button: law student Sukhmani Virdi uses Employment Foresight at Downtown Legal Services.
Blue J Legal startup now offering AIpowered employment law product Employment Foresight a hit with firms—and free for community legal clinics, such as Downtown Legal Services
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO FACULTY OF LAW
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woman recently contacted Downtown Legal Services after she was notified she was being let go from her low-wage accounting job. She wanted to know if the offer her employer made in her termination letter was fair. Like many people who ask the clinic for help, the woman couldn’t afford a lawyer, but still didn’t qualify for publicly funded legal representation under Ontario’s strict financial eligibility rules. Fortunately, the DLS community legal clinic operated by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law has free access to a new tool from Blue J Legal, an emerging AI start-up firm founded by U of T law professors Benjamin Alarie, Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon. Employment Foresight harnesses artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict legal outcomes, scanning mountains of data and case law to help users who feed it customized information from a questionnaire to asses a client’s situation. “I ran the woman’s information through the tool and it took me all of 15 minutes to give her a sense of what her entitlements were,” says Sukhmani Virdi, a second-year law student in the Employment Law Division at the clinic, who was able to assure the accountant the offer was fair and give her peace of mind.
