World's Fair 2025
Knowledge Graphs in Litigation Agents — Tom Smoker, WhyHow
Overview
This talk explores the application of knowledge graphs and multi-agent systems within the legal industry, specifically for identifying and supporting class-action lawsuits. It details how unstructured data from web scraping and legal discovery can be transformed into structured graphs to aid legal professionals in case research and analysis. The core thesis is that by leveraging these technologies, complex legal data can be made more accessible, accurate, and actionable for lawyers.
Who should watch
- AI engineers working with structured data and knowledge graphs.
- Product managers and builders in legal tech.
- Professionals seeking to improve legal discovery and case research processes.
- Those interested in applying multi-agent systems to complex, high-stakes domains.
Key takeaways
- Knowledge graphs are valuable for representing complex relationships in legal data, enabling explicit connections and large-scale analytics.
- Multi-agent systems can break down complex legal workflows into testable steps, but require careful structuring and guardrails due to potential inaccuracies.
- The legal industry demands high accuracy and precision, making probabilistic LLMs insufficient on their own; structured data and controlled state management are crucial.
- Web scraping combined with schema-based filtering can identify potential legal cases early by analyzing complaint density and velocity across various online platforms.
- Transforming mountains of discovery documents into structured graphs allows for faster dismissal of irrelevant information and honing in on genuinely useful data.
- Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in this context often focuses on generating structured reports that lawyers can act upon, rather than conversational interfaces.
- LLMs are powerful for piping together ML systems, enabling end-to-end value in applications where traditional ML alone might struggle with integration.
- Iteratively building, pruning, and querying graphs allows for consistent tracking of user needs and continuous improvement of generated reports.
Notable quotes
*Graphs are relations. That's part of the visual element. There's a backend element as well. But it's the benefit of using graphs is that I can see what is connected to something else.*
*Lawyers don't really like when things are incorrect. It is basically the whole industry is make this very specifically correct and proper and definitely in the right language.*
*GenAI is not better than machine learning. And LLMs are not you know better than traditional ML systems but there are situations in which one is fantastic and one is not.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.