Open Source Law, Omni Jurisdictional AI, and AI Agents with Zacharie Laïk

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I'm having the opportunity to host Zachary Laik. He has an incredible story and is now the CEO of Good Legal. He's the maintainer of Legal Data Hunter and has so many incredible credentials. He has studied at CERBON in Paris and also has an LLM by Northwestern University. Thank you so much for making the time to be here today, Zachary. Thank you so much for having me. I took a look at your podcast. It's really cool what you're doing, studying law around the world. I think it's a great subject to talk about. So I'm really happy to be here. I'm excited for our chat today, Zach. And to get us started, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more about your journey into law and also into legal tech. So actually, I grew up in the U.S. I was born in Paris, but I grew up in the U.S. And I did come back when I was 15, so I did my studies. I studied law in France, in Paris. So my parents were super happy because the tuition is really not the same as if it were like the U.S. And then I did a couple of exchanges. I went on Erasmus in the U.K. for a year in Warwick, then came back to France in the CERBON and then did an LLM. So I went to Northwestern University in Chicago for a year. And the reason I wanted to do this is because there's an equivalence in France. So if you get the bar in another country, you can take the bar afterwards in France. And the process is a bit shorter. So I was hoping to save time. I was supposed to save like a year and a half. I got caught by COVID, though, so I actually really did not save any time in the end. But yeah, so I took the bar in New York in 2019. I came back to France. I then did internships for three years in six different law firms. So six times six months, some nice law firms, some international American well-recognized law firms. And it took a while to be sworn in into the U.S. and then to take the equivalent exam in Paris. I ended up doing it. And then at that point is when Chagipiti came out. So I was kind of tired of the law firms already. I could maybe have gotten into, like found a job as an associate probably in a law firm at that point. But I mean, Chagipiti was out and this thing was really cool. So I was lucky enough to be in between jobs at that time. And so I just decided to get fully into it like 12 hours a day. And yeah, I launched my first tool in March of 2023. And I was super lucky that it got traction right away. I did a TikTok. It was a tool that did the case summaries for French law students. And yeah, I was super lucky. The first week, 8000 people registered on the on the on the tool. I mean, the first two days, it didn't work for anyone except for me. I had no clue why. But the reason why was because it only worked for admin people. So the non-admin people weren't allowed to use the tool. So yes, spent a couple of days debugging. And yeah, it's been the main source of my revenue for the past three years now, building legal tech tools and then deploying them online and having people who kind of follow me or follow the story actually end up finding it useful and sometimes even paying for what I do. So yeah, that's it's a bit long, but that's what happened. It's amazing. Quite, quite the story. You've studied then and worked across, you know, France, UK, US. So how did that cross-border experience also shape the way you see law nowadays? I grew up between countries. So oftentimes, I mean, it's not that often that you need to think in different legal systems for a specific case. But whenever I have a legal issue, I sort of end up having to. I was trying to work in this international setting, right, and in these international business law firms. And so you do have a lot of the workload, which is not just, you know, it doesn't just affect your jurisdiction. The client of the firm actually has worldwide operations, and in these firms, you have to support them worldwide. You're responsible for your jurisdiction, but often other issues from other jurisdictions will affect your case. And so you're always working with other lawyers from other offices of the same firm, which I think is super, super interesting. Also, it's where most of the interesting business law optimizations you can find. You really see weird stuff when you start playing with different jurisdictions. I worked once on a case in Turkey, and this law firm basically didn't know how, like it made a mistake when serving a process to someone in Turkey, and it resulted in like $4 billion in losses. Just like, just like that law firm just didn't know, just for one mistake, right? I love that. I love that. Thank you for sharing it. So, looking back at, you know, all of your legal education and also your work, I was curious if there were a few, you know, specific key moments or decisions that pushed you toward like building things. Were there a few specific moments that made you, you know, take those decisions? Yeah, I was super lucky when I was in Northwestern during my LLM, there was a great class taught by Dan Lina. He taught legal tech. And so he took, and we weren't that many to register, but like 20 or 30 people. And he just, he showed us it was possible to do stuff as lawyers and to actually make things that aren't just ephemeral, right? So like when, as lawyers, you're always like writing a document and then it takes a long time to write this document and then you're not even sure anyone will ever read it, right? And so it's kind of like this ephemeral workload and it's a bit frustrating. I think it was like a chatbot automation in Azure that allowed you to like make a decision tree. And because of this, you could like make decisions about how much taxes, about like your taxes, how to, how to optimize them. So it was very basic, but it was, it was the first time I was able to take knowledge and sort of like make it repeatable in a way, or like reusable. I really love the concept of not, of not having to do things ephemerally every time. Yeah. Also the billable hour. I mean, I think, I think it's a really, it's really tough on the people who bill the hours because you have an incentive to never stop. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. I also wanted to ask you to tell us a little more about, you know, Legal Data Hunter. You know, I think it's such a very ambitious project and that's how we first met, right? So I was, I was just scrolling on LinkedIn one evening and I saw somebody's trying to compile all the laws of the world together in this one platform. And I thought, my goodness, you know, I'm, I'm doing my whole like studying law around the world podcast. I got to get this guy on and chat a little bit about that. So I wanted to ask, you know, where did the idea come from? When did you realize that this was even, you know, possible? Yeah, sure. It's been a fantasy of mine for the past, like a couple of years too. So basically if you, if you build a legal AI chatbot or, or whatever, these are usually jurisdictional. Like some exceptions exist, like I think, I think Harvey and Legora, they decided to immediate immediately distribute without doing the jurisdictional data play, which was very smart in hindsight. But if most of the other legal tech solutions are usually jurisdictional and the reason why is the data, right? So they say, okay, we're able only to get the data from, from this jurisdiction and maybe they'll, they'll grab a couple of new ones. And so this, this, this makes the market very fragmented. And like, if you want to do multi-jurisdictional research, I mean, you kind of have to rely on Google and like, do you know how to read in the language you're trying to reason in? You know, like these are, these are hard issues. So I've felt like using these illegal AI solutions out there, I was always hitting the edge of the map. So like, I couldn't get like good citations outside of a couple of jurisdictions that was, that was supported. The bottleneck here is to actually write the scripts to get the data and then keep the, your database up to date. It's a huge issue. You've got hundreds of sources, thousands of sources all over the place. And so it's, it's, it's prohibitively expensive to, to actually try to make an exhaustive legal database. And so I tried to build this thing a dozen times and it never worked before. I tried with every new model, it was like trying to find a system where I could have a data hunter. So I would have, it would have this infinite task to-do list, right? It would have this infinite to-do list of sources to fetch. And then it would try to fetch them and then it would gather my feedback. And I could like this way, try and create a huge exhaustive database. And so it didn't work up until I tried to do it with Cloud Code with Opus 4.5 in January. And so basically it's just Cloud Code. It's a, it's a crone job on my computer. Every 30 minutes it tries to index a new source of law. So it's got a huge to-do list of thousands of sources that are possible to get all over the world. And every 30 minutes it tries to fetch one of them. And so, yeah, there's a very tight feedback loop because people are now contributing to the sources. So actually this week you contributed some new sources in Waterlaw in Canada, which allowed the agent to realize we were actually lacking a lot of data in Canada. So a lot more data is coming. And so yeah, it's now it's accessible by MCP. So this agent is kind of like every week it's adding on average 2 million new documents to this database, which is growing quite quickly and you can access it via MCP. So really the best way to use it is to plug it into your cloud or to plug it into your codex agent or whatever agent you use, or GPT or whatever, and or into your own tool if you're into that, if you're building your own tools. And yeah, you can access most of the world's open legal data this way with official links. And we're trying to keep it as up to date as possible. Right now, like every source gets updated every two months. I'm trying to get this down to two weeks. It's really fun to be part of because this like really broke a wall, right? It was like it was it was impossible to do like omnijurisdictional legal research six months ago. And now all suddenly like it's possible, right? This doesn't cost that much to build. So super exciting to be a part of. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, I think something that I found very interesting is that, you know, you go to the website and there's a dashboard, it shows a lot of what's going on. And then it shows a little bit of like the quote unquote problems with like legal accessibility around the world, right? So some jurisdictions only have, you know, stuff that is available on PDF. Some of them are not really open, open base. Are there some thoughts that you have on that? Why do you think access to legal information might be so fragmented, especially when you're trying to, you know, compile, you know, data sources and all of that? And then maybe even, you know, what does that tell us about the world we're living in? And are there some, you know, kind of consequences of gearing toward that direction? Yeah, I think it's crazy. It's crazy that the, that Google isn't that good of an index for law. It should be, right? Like, I think it really should be. I think the reason why is because there's no like commercial incentive to index your pages, right? That's maybe the only, the only reason, because in theory, like if, if you, if you want your citizens to follow the law, which is in the interest of the state, usually like you want the citizens to know the law. So you want it to be a very easily accessible, right? So I, it's, it's kind of a mystery to me why the law isn't perfectly indexed already, but it's, it's not. So you can't really rely on, on Google. And yeah, I think that some jurisdictions also have an interest, they don't want to publish. So for example, some, some jurisdictions like in China, it's, it's really hard to find legal decisions. The case law is kind of secretive. Unless you're in China, like probably you have to be a lawyer, you need to have certain authorizations to do it, which is the case also for France, right? You can't just go and download all of French case law without having an account. So like the degrees of openness vary, but I think that it just comes down to the state doesn't really have a financial incentive to, to make this highly accessible. So you still get these, these PDFs. It costs them a lot to actually make it accessible. Like if you've got everyone crawling your website, like the state doesn't really see the value in that, but, but, but it costs a lot. So they put it behind Cloudflare and so the bots get, get, get blocked, but it's, it's actually a problem because if we're going to have all these AI agents, you know, that are going to be running around and they're going to be, you know, maybe reasoning about law or they're, they're going to be like, if they can't see the law, it's going to be hard to have them respected. You're really kind of allowing it to be used in so many different ways. I think that probably just like me, a lot of the lawyers listening to the podcast are not, you know, very experts into, you know, developing and data coding and all of that. And I'm curious, you know, how do you see the project changing the ways that lawyers, researchers, and maybe even government interact with law as a whole? Oftentimes here in the podcast, I've had lawyers who came from jurisdiction, got qualified in another one, and they brought up things like they would be in a conversation with a lawyer from another country and they would be like, well, don't your country have a principle of these or that, which are like very universal principles. And they were like, Oh, how did you know that? Even though it is different, it's not that different, right? There's a lot of things that really translate well, especially in commercial law. So I'm curious if you have some thoughts on that as well, about like the conversions of law throughout the world. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. It's interesting way to put it. I think that some of them have like common roots. Obviously, you've got the civil law system, like that's kind of the, we inherit from the Romans and the, and the common law system, which we inherit from, from the UK, right? It's actually going to put more pressure on, I think that the ability to compare the law easier, it's really hard to compare laws, actually. It's really expensive. If you think about it, if you want to make a report comparing all the laws of the 27 countries in the EU on a specific point, it's 20, 27 lawyers, you know, maybe working for a day. So like 20, 27 lawyer, I think we were sub-optimizing the law, right? You need to make the law better in these different jurisdictions. So this, I think is going to be the real transformational power. Some, some states may be starting to adopt this, this legal data hunter to, to like compare with other countries, to see how other countries are doing it. And you've got international institutions who are also using the data hunter to kind of like build reports, comparing laws in, in different countries. And you can really do some really interesting new research that would have been way too expensive before. The scripts to download the, the law are all open sourced. So it's an AGPL license, which is it's, it's, it's a license that's contagious. So, so if you like improve a script, you have to, to open source it too. So like, this is the way I hope to, to, to really get a global coverage of the, of the, the legal sources. But yeah, I've seen some universities just download a full jurisdiction and then they can do some, some deep like statistical analysis analysis in, in a jurisdiction and I compare it to another one. So really different ways to, to, to use it. But so you, yeah, you can go either wide or, or, or deep in, in any jurisdiction. So yeah, I'm really excited to see what comes out of it. A lot of papers are going to be written in the next six months that are like kind of based on comparisons that are possible now because, because of it. And I'm super excited about it. Absolutely. I'm, I'm really hoping to be able to use those in my, in my research as well as we go forward. And just to wrap up today's episode, you know, thinking about law students and young lawyers listening in from different countries, especially those who are interested in law, technology, even comparative law, what would you suggest that they focus on today if they're, they want to be kind of part of what's coming next as you see it? Yeah. I think the first thing I would say is don't lower your standards. I think that like, CGPT was kind of an excuse to, for some people to, to say, okay, I don't need to think that much anymore. Like the AI is going to work for me. And the truth is there's two ways to look at it. You can, you can, you can look at it in a way that it's going to do the same thing that we were able to do before for much cheaper. And, and it's, it's just going to be an optimization tool, but I don't think this is the best way to look at it. I think, I think if you look at the AI and you think what's possible to do now, that what just wasn't possible like six, six months ago, it's a different, it's a different mindset. Like it's two different types of people. Like if you're, if you're in the, in the sec, in the second type, you're going to have a lot of fun. But if you're in the first one, like life is going to be a bit boring because you're going to see this AI just like coming into, into your life and you'd be like, what, what, what is my job supposed to be now? But if you look at it the other way and you're like, what can I do now? Like I couldn't do six months ago. I think you're going to have a great 10 years because there's so much stuff you could do now that you couldn't do before. Like even just managing a firm on, on your own, or like you can like experiment with these new agentic systems that will like have a second brain that's, that's like synced with your, your brain. And they can help you just when you go into the office in the morning, most of the work is done for you to be reviewed. And so, and they can deal with your marketing and they can, you know, publish online. Like, so there's so much, so much stuff that wasn't possible that, that, that now you, you can do. I think imagination is the best like skill to, to try and optimize for, I guess. That's amazing. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for, for making the time to come on the show and to share a little bit of your, you know, project and updates about your career life. It's been incredible. Thank you for the chat. Thank you so much, Claudio, for having me. Thank you.