Australian law firm IRIQ has developed an AI chat bot to help employees easily contact lawyers.
Using Brisbane-based technology group Blackbook.ai, IRIQ developed the ‘Riqi’ chatbot to help those facing employment problems to contact lawyers.
Established by Theresa Moltoni in 2008, IRIQ was initially focused on assisting clients to get their Agreements in place prior to the Fair Work Act coming into effect.
Developed over the last 12 months, Riqi has been built with convenience in mind: it is online 24/7 responding to questions, seeking information, and advising potential clients whether they likely have a strong case.
“A lot of people that get unfairly dismissed are generally people that work in hospitality, over the weekend. What we wanted was to give them access to an automated system which allowed them to essentially get an immediate response but also to capture the kind of question and answer that generally a user would spend almost half a day in front of a lawyer to do,” said Blackbook CEO Thuy Lam.
“It encourages them to act a bit more responsible as opposed to being annoyed about it; some people won’t even go and see a lawyer because it’s inconvenient to see a lawyer. We felt like a lot of employees needed this kind of immediate access at a reasonable cost on their platform so that they can actually work out what their rights.”
The legal sector in Australia has been fast to embrace technology but given its complexities firms have been reluctant to introduce the AI chatbot as part of the general process of seeing a lawyer Business News Australia reported.
With the launch of Riqi Lam believes that AI technology will embed itself into the legal sector, just not in the way one might expect.
“Generally, with chatbots they’re pretty quick to develop, especially for retail, but once you start getting into legal and IR law there’s a lot of rigorous testing and also the questions and answers need to be in human speak as opposed to legal speak,” says Lam.
“We had to untangle that so anybody could access it and talk to the machine in almost common language as opposed to legal language. That’s why it took a lot of time to build.”
