Cambridge law student launches Lord Denning-inspired search engine

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By Alex Aldridge on

It seeks to draw on spirit of great judge through artificial intelligence

A final year Cambridge University undergraduate has launched a new legal search engine called DenninX that’s specially tailored to law students.

Ludwig Konrad Bull’s venture uses artificial intelligence-derived processes to conduct research in a new way that, like the great judge Lord Denning, “does not follow orthodoxy and tradition”.

So quirky is DenninX that it even includes a ‘Today’s Memes’ section featuring a host of legal funnies.

Speaking to Legal Cheek, Bull said that “Denning had a different take to analysing legal problems, which in my personal opinion revealed some interesting things.” He continued:

DenninX is similar in that sense — instead of regurgitating information that people already have about case law, it provides a different take through various AI metrics.

The search engine, which is free and can be accessed here, apparently flags the most important parts of judgments, while also showing references to the searched case over time and calculating its similarity to other cases.

It’s these features, says Bull, that makes DenninX particularly suited to law students. He told us:

It was my experience of the problems law students face that led me to start this. I didn’t have the sort of information provided by DenninX when I wanted to prepare for an essay or an exam.

Denning meets Google?

Bull is part of the group of Cambridge students who launched legal chatbot LawBot last year. He says that his coding and developer skills are entirely self-taught, with DenninX created via a mixture of open source software and online video tutorials.

Currently the project only supports 2,000 cases, but Bull is aiming to dramatically increase this number to 20,000 by the summer. To that end he is looking for volunteers to help him.

As for his own plans, despite completing work experience at Dentons and Allen & Overy, Bull says he isn’t seeking a training contract and instead hopes to forge a long term career in legal technology.

Lord Denning fans can get one of Legal Cheek’s famous ‘Lord Denning is my Homeboy’ T-shirts here.

Watch the DenninX launch video here

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