Three Harvard graduates are leveraging AI to enhance productivity for lawyers in India

In India, where lawyers are still adapting to the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), three Harvard graduates are attempting to usher in a new era in legal tech by launching jhana.ai, a generative AI paralegal or legal assistant.

Jhana, which means mental absorption and meditation in Pali, was founded by Ben Hoffner-Brodsky, Hemanth Bharatha Chakravarthy and Em McGlone, who were classmates at Harvard.

The tool helps lawyers reliably delegate tasks such as reviewing and summarising long and complex documents, and producing research faster and with higher fidelity.

“You can use jhana to input messages and files to produce any kind of practice output such as propositions, memos, advisory, or even full-fledged drafts and redlines. The AI researches and cites a 15M+ database of case law, statute, and academic authorities. It can even browse the web like a human or use plugins, for example, for patent prior art,” said Chakravarthy.

The founders say that jhana combines advanced search capabilities with an extensive legal database automating critical, time-intensive tasks for lawyers and expanding access to justice.

“jhana is India’s first AI paralegal. Our journey began when I was building legal access technology at World Bank DE JURE and Hemanth was working with the Gates Foundation on government procurement and contracting. We had taken sophisticated tooling for granted at the Harvard library. But, the process by which India's legacy journals digitised themselves was not led by technologists or vision, but was a compulsion of times. We were clearly behind the West in adopting and developing different kinds of legal practice and management tools. We realised there was a lot of catch up. It thus became abundantly clear to us that the primitive state of practice tools in Indian laws was an opportunity to build an AI-first legal platform that transcends access into intelligibility,” said Brodsky.

jhana is modelled to let users interact with a chatbot that iterates, reflects and adapts research steps till it can produce your deliverable or answer.

It can read an individual contract or an entire due diligence data room, and tabulate well-referenced red flags and risks. It can trace judgments and statutes to map the enforceability and compliances for your deal. Or, it can replace a search engine as a primary research platform for litigation work. It can also find favourable and onerous precedents for an issue or argument, and can identify grounds for appeal or strategies for hearings. It can read case documents, understand the factual matrix, and perform background to in-depth advisory research.

“jhana.ai is India's first AI paralegal assistant designed specifically for the Indian legal system. At jhana, we believe that if lawyers are using better tools for research, it can improve the quality of justice everywhere,” said McGlone.

jhana’s AI is trained on a vast database of over 15 million legal documents, including court orders that are updated daily with AI-generated headnotes, statutes, notifications and supplements, academic legal scholarship from reliable authorities, news stories, and web content relevant to Indian law.

"It is always providing quotes, links and Standard Indian Legal Citations (SILC) to support its reasoning. It does not make assumptions or rely on black-box algorithms. The AI's thought process is fully transparent. Any claims made by Jhana's AI include inline source links that take users directly to the original document being referenced. Outputs also include relevant quotes and citations to allow easy verification of the AI's responses. Users can also report errors or inaccuracies through feedback buttons. This minimises hallucinations, or what users refer to as responses that are made up,” said Amanullah Qaiser, the Legal Research Lead at Jhana.

Similar AI tools that users can rely on currently include Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel, and Harvey. However, the founders say what sets jhana apart is that it is dedicated to the Indian jurisdiction and the legal ecosystem in India.

The startup's mission is to modernise India's legal sector and improve accessibility to legal resources using AI-powered tools.

jhana offers pricing plans for its AI paralegal services suitable for law students, institutions and individual users.

Last month, it closed a $1.6-million seed funding round, led by venture capital firm Together Fund.

The team now comprises over 20 members including PhDs, professors and practitioners in both AI and the law. They are working towards building various datasets, models, and applications to help make legal work more “fulfilling, abstracted, and realised.”

“We have now grown and been hard at work, trusting the adage — may the rising tide lift all boats,” said McGlone.