The University of Liverpool has begun a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project with Riverview Law, a Wirral-based fixed-price legal services business.
The project is designed to leverage the University’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) expertise in the legal market.
KTP is a government-funded scheme to enable businesses with a strategic need to access University expertise and knowledge to improve their competitiveness, productivity and performance.
A primary objective of the partnership will be to automate some of the cognitive abilities of knowledge economy workers to provide organisations with intelligent decision support tools.
Two Research Associates will be employed on the project to support the development of tools that will enable Riverview Law to apply a range of leading-edge computer science expertise in areas as diverse as artificial intelligence, text processing, network analysis, computational argumentation and data mining.
Expert systems
Dr Katie Atkinson, Reader in the Agent Applications, Research, and Technology (Agent ART) Group at the University’s Department of Computer Science, said: “We are delighted to be working with such an innovative company as Riverview Law. From our first meeting we were struck by the commitment its team has to the application of technology, not only in its own business but also in the way it delivers services to its global customers.”
Karl Chapman, Chief Executive of Riverview Law, said: “Over the last 18 months, as we developed our thinking in the AI and expert systems field, we were delighted to find such relevant world-class expertise on our doorstep – North-West England really is becoming the centre of the legal universe!
“We are very focused on providing expert systems and tools that support knowledge work as well as the way AI and such systems can help our teams and our customers make quicker and better decisions.”
Dr Atkinson is also Program Chair for the ICAIL 2015 conference of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law.