The perks of working at a legal startup include leading initiatives, interacting with co-founders, and volleyball intramurals.
Photo credit: Blue J Legal
Question: What do singing at a talent show, attending a tech social, and researching case law have in common?
Answer: These are all activities that I did as a Summer Research Associate at Blue J Legal.
Let me start by describing what Blue J Legal is. Blue J Legal is a startup that leverages prior judicial decisions, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to predict the outcome of court cases. Users fill out a questionnaire, and the software generates an outcome of which way a court will rule and the algorithm’s degree of confidence in that judgment.
For those of you who don’t know, three of the co-founders of Blue J Legal are professors at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, including Professors Alarie, Yoon, and Niblett.
As a Summer Research Associate, four other students and I were tasked with researching cases, interpreting them, and feeding that information into the system, which would use the data to refine its predictions of future cases. The accuracy of this analysis is directly related to the accuracy of the algorithm itself in predicting outcomes.
Prior to this experience, I hadn’t been exposed to the startup world, and it was definitely an enlightening experience. Since Blue J Legal is located at OneEleven, a startup incubator, we were surrounded by innovative startups at various stages of their life cycles. Because of this, we were exposed to informative sessions targeted towards startups and attended lunch & learns on statistical analysis, machine learning, and legal topics.
One of the most exciting aspects of my summer was being around people who were passionate about both what they were doing and their business’s value propositions. Since the Blue J Legal team is relatively small, we had the opportunity to get to know everyone, including people in the marketing, sales, customer success, and strategy functions. At the weekly sprint reviews, the whole team would get together, and we had the opportunity to hear about every happening in the company, whether it was about weekly progress updates or financing.
Blue J Legal is not only open to, but actively welcomes better ideas. It was refreshing to be able to voice opinions freely, ask questions, and see suggestions get implemented almost immediately. And, more often, to be the person leading the initiative. The biggest impact on me was seeing how much of a difference I could make.
On the social front, there was a bevy of activities to get involved in, including volleyball intramurals, a talent show (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen the Blue J Legal comedy band play a loop of the CTO yawning in slow motion while churning out a parody of an 80s rock song), Blue Jays game (of course, puns reign supreme here), and a tech summer social, which brought together founders, funders, industry, and talent to celebrate Canada’s tech ecosystem (refer to a picture of us at the event)!
If you have the slightest interest in the tech space and legal research and want to work with great people, I would definitely recommend a summer at Blue J Legal.
