Isaacus – the legal AI research company

Hey HN, This is Isaacus, a legal AI research company that my brother, Abdur-Rahman Butler, and I, Umar Butler, founded last year and have been working full time on ever since.

We make legal AI models. We recently released two state-of-the-art legal information retrieval models, Kanon 2 Embedder and Kanon 2 Reranker. Together, they rank first on Legal RAG Bench and the Massive Legal Embedding Benchmark (MLEB).

We also recently released Kanon 2 Enricher, an entirely new type of AI model capable of transforming lengthy, unstructured legal documents into highly structured knowledge graphs. We had the pleasure of having Harvey, KPMG Law, Alvarez & Marsal, Clifford Chance, Clyde & Co, Carey Olsen, Smokeball, and Moonlit be part of the closed beta for that model.

We're proud supporters of open source and maintain popular legal and AI datasets and libraries like the Open Australian Legal Corpus and the semchunk semantic chunking algorithm, together downloaded over one million times a month.

Our core mission is to solve every common data- and AI-related pain point of the legal tech industry. Uniquely, we're focused primarily on serving the legal tech industry rather than lawyers per se.

We, therefore, view folks like Harvey and Legora as customers instead of competitors.

In the few months since we've been around, we've witnessed massive growth in usage of our models by other new legal tech startups. We think our industry is only going to get bigger, particularly as more accessible legal services make their way into the hands of end consumers and enterprises instead of law firms.

We see ourselves as best placed to serve the needs of our industry given our strong experience and expertise in AI and law. I previously led all national-level AI projects at the Australian Attorney-General's Department as a senior data scientist while also holding an honors degree in law. My brother, in turn, is skilled in economics, data science, and AI.

We're currently working on scaling up our team to meet the growing demand we're seeing as well as help build out the next stage of our roadmap, which includes a first-of-a-kind knowledge graph of laws, decisions, and contracts from around the world, as well as the first legal reasoning model.

If you align with our mission and would like to partner with us or be part of our team, you can reach out at [email protected].