Regarding the latest developments in the dispute between Ross Intelligence and Thompson Reuters, we report the interview that The Impact Lawyers conducted with Ross Intelligence CEO Andrew Arruda:

A day after Thomson Reuters and two other Plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against ROSS Intelligence, its CEO, Andrew Arruda, posted a statement on his Medium website. In this publication Arruda denies the allegations made by the Plaintiffs and answers the questions posed by THE IMPACT LAWYERS via email.

As described by Arruda, in 2017 Ross Intelligence hired the services of LegalEase to build a dataset to test artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

“We needed legal questions mapped directly to passages from case law that answer those questions. It was crucial that the passages mapped directly to case law in our database because we wanted to teach our system to give on-point answers directly from primary law”, Arruda announces on his Medium account.

In 2018, Westlaw accused LegalEase of supplying to ROSS Intelligence proprietary data in the form of headnotes, case summaries, and other editorial content. “Not only could we not map this proprietary data to the case law in our database, our technology does not attempt to generate editorialized answers; instead, it aims to recognize and extract answers directly from case law using machine learning”.

Arruda acknowledges that his company received emails from LegalEase offering content from Westlaw. Arruda announces bluntly: "We immediately told them not to include such proprietary information”. In his Medium account, Arruda attached images of emails sent by LegalEase to Ross Intelligence offering this content:

The CEO of ROSS Intelligence admits to THE IMPACT LAWYERS the innocence of his company in this case. “Westlaw subpoenaed us for all communications, agreements, and work product related to the past claim against LegalEase. They were unable to find any evidence that we used or benefited from Westlaw’s data. Moreover, Westlaw’s proprietary data is of no use to us”.

The business relationship between ROSS and LegalEase has always been lawful. "ROSS trusted LegalEase to provide us with the deliverables as contracted for," Arruda tells to THE IMPACT LAWYERS. Also, Arruda encloses on its Medium website the Statement of Work signed between ROSS and LegalEase in September 2017.

ROSS's mission is clear: “democratize the law through better legal technology”. The method for developing their artificial intelligence (AI) systems are legal. “We contract with legal data providers such as Fastcase and Casemaker. We have spent over a million dollars on this data to date”.

Arruda acknowledges to THE IMPACT LAWYERS that this is the first time their company has been sued for theft of Property Data. Arruda defends that ROSS Intelligence has developed its AI systems without stealing Westlaw's content and does not fear the proceedings in which his company has just been involved. “The facts and the law are on our side. More details are to come in our legal response to the complaint”.