State Visit to Canada goes LegalTech
Last week, our LegalTech Startup lex.be had the great honour to be invited to the Belgian State Visit to Canada by Their Majesties the King and the Queen of the Belgians.
Without any doubt, these 6 days were an incredible journey and amazing discovery of the strong relationship between Canada and Belgium.
It was also a great opportunity to discover the LegalTech landscape in Canada, and especially in Montréal. During my 2 days in Montréal, I had the chance to meet a lot of actors and enthusiasts of the legal ecosystem:
Visit to MILA
MILA, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, is an impressive collaboration between Université de Montréal and McGill University, dedicated to Artificial Intelligence.
On top of the numerous teaching programs offered by MILA, they are building an unique place to federate researchers in the area of deep learning and machine learning for AI. Researchers are working in a very close relationship with businesses to ensure proper technology transfer.
Indeed, Montreal aims to become a world centre of artificial intelligence and is doing a pretty good job at becoming THE hub for AI and deep learning.
Montreal’s position as a deep learning centre can largely be attributed to the efforts of Yoshua Bengio, considered to be one of the three “co-fathers” of deep learning technology. Bengio was already engaged in cutting-edge research at the Université de Montréal long before deep learning was considered viable.
Here are the 3 building blocks of this thriving and role-model ecosystem:
- Research
MILA is not only becoming a reference spot for AI, but they are expanding their activities. IVADO is another project funded by MILA in September. IVADO is the institute for data valorization, a scientific and economic data science hub. In short, IVADO is a multi-disciplinary centre fostering the link between academic research and business needs of organizations of all sizes, including startups. - Investment
As Artificial Intelligence is seen now as a strategic asset to governments and to corporations, everybody fights for resources.
No surprise that Canada is investing massively in AI: Ottawa promised $213 million to fund AI and big data research at four Montreal post-secondary institutions, Quebec dedicated $100 million over the next five years for the development of an AI “super-cluster” in the Montreal region, and MILA got $4.5 million from Alphabet Inc.’s Google. - AI startups are growing quickly and strengthen the AI ecosystem:
Lyrebird, founded by 3 PhD students, has developed speech synthesis software that can copy anyone’s voice and make it say anything.
ElementAI, an artificial intelligence startup factory at which Bengio is one of the co-founders, was launched in October 2016.
Botler AI uses AI to help immigrants navigate the labyrinthine immigration process. The product uses actual cases and government guidelines to help steer users seeking admission to Quebec’s foreign workers and student program.
This model was nicely summarized by Jean-Francois Gagné, ElementAI co-founder and CEO:
In simple terms the MILA does academic research, the IVADO does industrial research, and Element AI builds applications in partnership with industry for commercialization of AI,”
Conference on “Algorithmic Governance”
Lex.be was invited to a great panel on Algorithmic Governance, to discuss the fast evolution and growing impact of algorithms in existence. As algorithms are everywhere, they became a big part of our daily lives, guiding our actions and behaviours. However, the prevalence of algorithms in government, economic and societal decisions raises issues of transparency, sovereignty and regulation, and important questions about the restriction of our space of freedom and our power of collective action.
We were honoured by the presence of Their Majesties the King and the Queen of the Belgians, Philippe Couillard - Premier of Québec and Valérie Plante - Mayor of Montreal.
Professor Hugues Bersini, a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, professor at the ULB and co-director of the IRIDIA laboratory, gave a great overview of the stakes at play and the challenges of AI in our (over)connected life surrounded by benevolent algorithms aiming at your “well-being”.
The debate was really interesting and moderated by Catherine Mathys, freelance journalist, columnist for The Sphere, ICI Radio-Canada Première. For sure, Catherine truly enjoyed challenging the panel bringing together experts in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity from Montreal and Belgium:
- Karim Benyekhlef is a professor at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Montréal and Director of the Cyberjustice Laboratory, a space for reflection and creation where justice processes are modeled and redesigned. The Laboratory team analyzes the impact of technologies on justice and develops concrete technological tools adapted to the reality of judicial systems.
- Jane Murphy is co-founder of the European Data Protection Office (EDPO) and a lawyer specializing in business law and privacy.
- Gilles de Saint-Exupéry is a lawyer and co-founder of Lex Start. Faced with the evolution of the legal world and the rise of entrepreneurship, LexStart offers innovative legal solutions tailored to start-up entrepreneurs.
- Jonathan Berte is President and CEO of Robovision, a company he co-founded 10 years ago. Today an international leader, Robovision supports companies to integrate AI into their organization.
- Eric Rodriguez is co-founder of lex.be a new legal research platform offering citizens and legal professionals the opportunity to benefit from a massive influx of information.
I only wish we had more time to discuss this important topic with Professor Hugues Bersini and Karim Benyekhlef who collaborated on challenges very close to the one we experienced in the Belgian LegalTech environment and lex.be.
We only had the chance to quickly address important topics as the need for open data, transparency of algorithms, regulation, … which are core concepts to support democracies and their legal systems.
Meet the LegalTechs
I spent my last day in Montreal meeting as many LegalTech players as possible in order to understand the similarities and differences with Belgium, but also the challenges faced by other innovators in the legal industry:
- I started the day with a (too) early coffee with Claire Mazzini from Legal Suite which provides software solutions for in-house counsel. It was an energising and great discussion about the current legal landscape in Canada. Claire was literally my first shade of light to understand the local ecosystem, and her mixed interest between legal and technology was the perfect combination to jump into the LegalTech Montreal.
- Gabrielle Paris from Propulsion360 was the first person to contact me to exchange about our experience in the legal industry. It was enlightening to discover Gabrielle’s views on legal innovation, especially given her expertise in artificial intelligence’s civil liability. I think there are many lessons we can share between Canada and Belgium about the impact of technology and the related legal responsibilities. Thanks again for this warm welcome in the post-winter Montreal.
- Gilles de Saint-Exupéry is the very dynamic co-founder of Lex Start offering easy-to-use and fixed price legal kits to help you kickstart your business. I quickly met Gilles during the Algorithmic Governance panel but it was great to dive into the story of Lex Start to better understand their product and positioning, and also the challenges of innovating in the legal industry. I really enjoy the Gilles’ energy and openness to share his experience in the Canada LegalTech scene.
- Alexandre Désy is author and lecturer with a strong background in law and economics. His focus is on technology and legal innovation lead him to be a very early legal tech pioneer with BidSettle.com, a platform to challenge and facilitate the access to justice for the average person. Alexandre was kind to share his very deep understanding of the LegalTech trends and I really benefited from his expertise on how innovation must and will transform the legal landscape.
What stroke me the most from the exchange with these entrepreneurs is the numerous similarities with Belgium: multilingual country with almost the same maturity in the LegalTech ecosystem.
Well to be honest, I think Canada is (a bit) ahead of the current state in Belgium, as Canada pays attention and invest to support innovation, Artificial Intelligence and open legal data while having a strong focus on diversity, inclusivity and equality in the society.
We also discussed our respective initiatives LegalTech Montréal and LegalTech.be as we both started Meetups to promote the use of technology for legal innovation. We clearly share the same challenge of building bridges between lawyers and tech startups to find together innovative solutions. It’s clearly a effort in the long run, and we’re only a the beginning of this LegalTech journey.
I really want to thank each of them for taking the time to meet and to depict the LegalTech landscape in Canada.
Each time it was a great encounter with amazing and passionate people.
I really enjoyed the truly open discussions on the evolutions bringing legal industry and technology together.
There are still many other people I would have love to meet, but let’s keep that as an excuse to quickly go back to Canada… 🇧🇪✈️🇨🇦
