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Gavin Sheridan
Co-Founder and CEO at Vizlegal
Gavin Sheridan is the co-founder and CEO of Vizlegal, a legal technology company that aims to make legal information more accessible and transform it into structured data.12 He has a background in journalism, law, and technology.6
Professional Background
Prior to founding Vizlegal, Sheridan worked as the Director of Innovation at Storyful, a social media intelligence company.1 He is also the co-founder of Right to Know CLG, an Irish NGO focused on requesting and publishing public information.5
Education
Sheridan attended University College Cork from 2005 to 2008, where he obtained a Bachelor's Degree in History and Politics.4
Vizlegal
At Vizlegal, Sheridan leads a remote-first team working to make legal information more accessible and convert it into structured data.2 The company's mission is to empower lawyers by indexing and graphing relationships between legal information worldwide.1 Vizlegal has made significant progress in creating a global repository of indexed and structured legal judgments and filings, with a particular focus on Ireland, the EU, and the UK.1
Other Roles and Interests
Sheridan is known for his work in freedom of information and transparency. He is involved with Access Info Europe, an organization promoting the right of access to information.5 On social media, he frequently discusses topics related to journalism, law, and technology.6
Gavin Sheridan's LinkedIn profile can be found at linkedin.com/in/gavinsheridan.3
Highlights
Have you come across a complex piece of litigation and had to trawl the internet to find greater context for all the judgments in the case? We have too, so we fixed it. Here's an example of a case - Brownfield Restoration - lasting almost 20 years, with multiple judgments across those years: but all in one Timeline. How long would it take you to trawl the internet and find each and every one of these decisions? 🤔🤔😬
SNEAK AI Preview. So at Vizlegal we have taken a somewhat careful, slow and deliberate approach towards ML/AI implementation. We evaluate commercial and open source models regularly, and keep up to date with new capabilities. But we are fully aware of the anxiety in the legal community (and our customers) around hallucinations, and some of the overpromising/underdelivering that can sometimes happen.
We now feel that we have something we can test and get feedback on - AI summarisation of judgments. Below is an early preview. In this example of an Irish High Court decision on a planning issue, you get the context of the decision with Vizlegal Timeline of events in the case at the top the judgment, showing which ABP decision was the subject of the Judicial Review, the High Court Record of the JR (which can also be tracked) and the judgment. You can then generate some quick notes and a 500 word narrative summary of the decision with one click.
From a pool of barristers and solicitors we tested this with, the feedback so far has been ZERO hallucinations, and generally "excellent", or "very, very smart" summary reviews. We will continue to test with more customers over the coming weeks. #ai #legaltech 🎉
