Josef chief executive and co-founder Tom Dreyfus said that the tool could benefit a wide variety of teams within businesses.

“For teams like legal, compliance, information security and HR, which are constantly under pressure to do more with less, Josef Q gives them the power to deliver instant answers to questions about policies and other complex content,” he said.

“This is a high-tech knowledge management tool that dramatically reduces the time spent answering FAQs for professionals who should be — and want to be! — spending their time on higher value work.”

Last November, AI research and deployment company OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot interface for an AI tool called GPT3 that “interacts in a conversational way” and generates text in response to different prompts. The bot can come up with comprehensive and coherent responses — and could potentially be used in several industries for admin tasks or document drafting.

In February, tech giant Microsoft, which originally invested $1 billion into the start-up in 2019, announced a further multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, with Microsoft Azure continuing to be the exclusive cloud provider for the company moving forward.

AI tech has, thus far in 2023, had a massive impact on the legal profession as platforms like ChatGPT continue to make global headlines.

This has been seen in the recent uptake of ChatGPT in the Clayton Utz environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practice, as well as Allen & Overy recently partnering with a chatbot lawyer, “Harvey”. This extends past BigLaw, as numerous sole GCs have said that AI tech can help scale their workload and improve their day-to-day.

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A noisy debate has subsequently emerged over ChatGPT and similar AI tech. On the one hand, platforms like ChatGPT are a “useful resource” for boutique firms and BigLaw firms alike and will require a focus on key skills and a rethink on legal education, with such platforms being critical for young lawyers’ toolkits, even if the new tech can’t replace lawyers entirely (at least not yet).

However, there are certainly fears that AI’s rise could mean the beginning of the end of lawyers — even if it should be used cautiously in courts and demands new workplace policies, despite the fact that ChatGPT can be used to cheat on law school exams and is, in the eyes of some, “no different to Wikipedia”. Billable hours have also been revealed to be at further risk with the development of AI tech.

To read Lawyers Weekly’s full series of ChatGPT stories, click here.

Josef Q can be tailored to the specific needs of each business, providing the right answer to the right person when they need it. The tool creates a paper trail that can be used to track, report on, and prove compliance — and next week, Josef will release a free beta version of the tool at Legalweek in New York.

“It was important to us that we launched the tool for free to the public. Josef’s mission is to make legal services more accessible, and so it makes perfect sense for us to do the same with our technology. All people have to do is sign up to the waitlist and they’ll get access next week,” Mr Dreyfus added.

“The more open, transparent and collaborative we can be as a community, the better placed we are to change the way legal work is done for the better. Josef Q is the next step in that journey for Josef.” 

To use the tool, policies, processes, or regulations can be uploaded into Josef Q, which can then be trained with a “handful of questions” and launched in minutes, according to Mr Dreyfus.

“The end-user experience is advanced compared to traditional knowledge management tools. Josef Q is dynamic and engaging, with the user accessing incredibly accurate answers in seconds,” he said.

And despite compliance professionals raising concerns about the accuracy of tools like ChatGPT, Josef Q’s knowledge base alleviates these risks, added Gunderson Dettmer chief innovation officer Joe Green.  

“It’s exciting to see legal tech companies like Josef bringing the incredible capabilities of the latest generation of large language models to law firms and in-house legal departments,” he said.

“There are so many potential use cases for this technology that lawyers will now be able to explore.”