Blue J Legal

Blue J Legal is a legal technology software company headquartered in Toronto, Canada. The company operates as a legal expert system in the domain of computer-assisted legal research and emulations for predictions of legal outcomes in the tax law, labor law and human resources litigation. Blue J Legal was founded in 2015 by Canadian jurists Benjamin Alarie, Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon, as well as technologist Brett Janssen.
==History== 
The company began in 2015 as a joint incubator project of the UTEST (University of Toronto Early Stage Technology) program and IBM's initiative to develop new AI applications for its Watson (computer). Among the company's founders were Benjamin Alarie, Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon, three Canadian lawyers and academics. Brett Janssen joined the company the same year as the company’s first CTO. By 2017 the company developed its first product Tax Foresight (later renamed Blue J Tax), a computer-assisted legal research for predictions of the legal outcomes in the Canada tax litigation system.
Eventually, the company developed other products Blue J L&E (formerly Employment Foresight) and Blue J HR.
In January 2018, Department of Justice (Canada) in Canada launched an 18 months pilot program that applied Blue J Legal technology, in particular its software program Tax Foresight. The program, which also involved the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), was used for legal outcomes analyses and predictions in the field of tax litigation. Later, Federal Justice Department also applied Blue J Legal technology to predict results in public service labour and employment cases.
In addition to Canada, the company has been also developing software tools for the US market in the fields of tax and employment law. Blue J Legal has its main office in Toronto with the satellite offices in New York City and Washington D.C.
==Technology components== 
Blue J Legal is a specific example of a general category of legal expert systems, broadly defined as systems that make use of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to solve legal problems. Artificial intelligence and law|Legal AI systems can be divided into two categories: legal retrieval systems and legal analysis systems. Blue J Legal belongs to the latter category of legal analysis systems. Designed to operate in more than one legal domain, Blue J Legal accounts for statute law, case law, and the doctrine of precedent in areas of public law. Whilst it accommodates statute law, it is primarily a case-based system.
Blue J Legal software operates as a hybrid legal expert system, combining rule – based reasoning with neural network theory to emulate the decision-making abilities of a human expert in the field of law. Basically, it employs a legal case-based reasoning from previously tried cases and other relevant data, comparing the contextual information in the current input case with that of cases previously tried and entered into the system. It is designed to assist attorneys, judges, mediation|mediators, and lawyers and individuals with legal expertise.
==Limitations and ethics concerns== 
Arguments have been made that a failure to take into consideration various theoretical approaches to legal decision making will produce expert systems that fail to reflect the true nature of decision making. Meanwhile, some legal expert system architects contend that because many lawyers have proficient legal reasoning skills without a sound base in legal theory, the same should hold true for legal expert systems. Alt URL . Also .
A number of legal experts note that new legal technologies such as Blue J Legal software might eventually replace many legal occupations or hand over excessive authority to AI algorithms. However, they also admit that algorithms mostly perform routine and menial tasks that were earlier assigned to the young lawyers and trainees.
 
Category:Companies based in Toronto 
Category:Software companies established in 2015 
Category:Software companies of Canada