Karan Kalia: Revolutionizing Legal Research with AI and Legitquest

Law is an intricate field, rooted in detailed documents, legal journals, case law, and judgments, making it a data-centric and exhaustive realm. Legal professionals, including judges, lawyers, students, and stakeholders, dedicate extensive time and effort to comb through vast archives for case law analysis. However, Karan Kalia is changing the game with Legitquest, a legal research platform designed to streamline and simplify the legal research process.

Legitquest is a unique legal research portal that employs artificial intelligence (AI) to create a comprehensive online database of judgments passed by the Supreme Court and High Courts of India since 1950. With features like iDRAF and iGraphics, Legitquest segregates issues, reasoning, decisions, arguments, and facts within these judgments. This innovative approach significantly reduces the time required for legal research. According to the company’s analysis, users of Legitquest save up to 40 percent of their time on legal research. Kalia, the driving force behind Legitquest, recognized the need for enhanced legal technology in India and founded this startup in 2016. In 2017, he was joined by Himanshu Puri and Rohit Shukla, who brought management and technology expertise to the table. Together, they co-founded the platform, which harnesses natural language processing and deep learning to provide the legal community with fast and precise results.

One of the standout features of Legitquest is its commitment to not just simplifying legal research but also creating a comprehensive solution for corporate legal requirements. The team is developing a litigation score software, known as the LIBIL score, which is analogous to the Cibil score in the financial sector. This innovative score will assist lawyers and corporations in conducting due diligence and verification processes, offering valuable insights to various industries such as finance, insurance, real estate, and recruitment on a global scale. This addition complements the platform’s ZAIAN feature, a real-time case law analyzer powered by AI.

Legitquest has come a long way from its initial freemium model to the current subscription-based platform. The portal provides access to a vast legal database, and value-added features like iDRAF and iGraphics are now part of the subscription package. Legal professionals, law firms, corporate entities, educational institutions, government agencies, chartered accountants, and company secretaries, among others, benefit from Legitquest’s extensive database. The platform boasts an impressive 92 percent subscription renewal rate among its clientele. In 2021, Legitquest secured a seed funding of Rs 5 crore from Info Edge India and WaterBridge Ventures, marking a significant milestone in the company’s growth journey. The platform has garnered support from former Supreme Court judges MB Lokur and AK Sikri, who serve on its national advisory board. With a 3x year-on-year growth rate, Legitquest is solidifying its position in the legal tech space.

Rohit Shukla, the co-founder and CTO of Legitquest, explained the challenging task of building a legal database from the ground up. This process involved data prioritization, collection from public sources using automated bots and human intervention, data cleansing, and tagging. The end result is the Legitquest portal, offering access to a wealth of legal information with user-friendly search features. Himanshu Puri, the co-founder and COO, revealed that Legitquest has plans to expand its research vertical by establishing teams in more Indian cities. The long-term vision includes entering international markets.

As Legitquest continues to evolve, the company is focusing on enhancing its AI/ML capabilities and developing an end-to-end cloud-native data platform for enterprise customers. Additionally, the company is in discussions with Microsoft to integrate Legitquest into the MS Office suite of products. Karan Kalia and his team are on a mission to redefine how legal research is conducted in India, opening up new horizons in the legal tech landscape.