Christian Beck’s LawConnect to provide ‘free’ legal advice to Australians

Christian Beck, who won last year’s Sydney to Hobart, has launched an AI-powered platform to provide free legal advice to Australians – and he doesn’t mind if it makes a loss.

Christian Beck has launched an AI-powered platform to provide Australians with free legal advice. Picture: John Feder/The Australian

Richlister Christian Beck has launched an artificial intelligence-powered platform to provide Australians with free legal advice – and he doesn’t mind if it makes a loss in the short-term.

Mr Beck unveiled the tool, dubbed LawConnect – the same name he gave to his $1.6m boat that won last year’s Sydney to Hobart – a world first, connecting consumers with lawyers.

LawConnect provides people with AI-generated answers to a range of legal queries from updating wills to family law disputes. A lawyer then verifies those answers and has the option of signing a LawConnect user as a client if they want to take the matter further.

“Most people around the world who have a legal problem can’t find or afford a lawyer, and so I think AI is really good at changing the game there,” Mr Beck said, saying he planned to launch it globally.

“LawConnect is working to ensure that justice is not a privilege, but a fundamental right available to all. Our mission is to become the largest provider of pro-bono legal assistance, ensuring that everyone has access to the support they need.”

Christian Beck, skipper of LawConnect, celebrates winning line honours at the 2023 Sydney to Hobart.

It comes as Mr Beck has had two redundancy rounds at ATI Global, which owns LawConnect as part of a broader restructure to bring in more AI expertise. The company’s annual net loss has deepened to $238.8m from $176.9m after financing costs soared by more than $58m. But Mr Beck said he was comfortable with ATI’s debt levels and said its operations earnings were positive.

While AI was a “game-changer” he said accuracy remained a problem with AI-generated answers. In New York last year, a federal judge issued sanctions against two lawyers who cited fake ChatGPT-generated legal research in a personal injury case, blasting the attorneys for wasting the court’s time.

“AI, I think, is mostly right from a consumer advice point of view, but it can be wrong and obviously wrong is quite dangerous,” Mr Beck said.

This is why lawyers verify LawConnect’s answers. The system is integrated with LEAP Legal Software, a case management tool for lawyers. They can check AI answers from consumers, who are initially anonymous, submit any edits and if a consumer wants to take the matter further they can agree to share their details and the lawyer signs them up as a client.

Mr Beck said it aimed to reduce the business development burden for lawyers by providing them with customer leads. For each AI answer they verify, they get credits they can spend on gaining a customer via LawConnect.

“What that does is incentivise the lawyers to do all the verification for free in return for them getting leads. So that’s the process, and what that really means for the consumer, everyone’s going to get free answers verified by experienced lawyers.”

The LawConnect boat in last year’s Sydney to Hobart.

LawConnect uses OpenAI’s platform. Mr Beck – whose wealth was estimated at $966m, ranking him 162nd in The List Australia’s Richest 250 – said data wasn’t shared with the US company and “nobody outside the firm gets it”.

He chose to make the service free to focus on making it popular to secure its widespread adoption.

“From our point of view there’s revenue opportunities down the track, but we don’t have any objective to make any money out of it at the moment. The analogy I use for non-tech people is if you’re starting a nightclub, it’s hard to make a nightclub cool. But once you’ve made it cool, it’s easy to make money out of it.”

ATI Global – in which Mr Beck retains a 58 per cent stake – delivered an operating profit of $111.36m in the year to June 30, versus $36.69m the previous year. But its borrowings increased to $2.71bn from $2.51bn, with financing costs totalling $366.8m. This resulted in a net loss of $241.5m.

Mr Beck said he was comfortable with the debt level.

Christian Beck is thrown into the water by his crew during an official presentation for the annual Sydney to Hobart yacht race.

“We’re a little bit different to most in the industry. Virtually everyone else, they’re kind of equity funded whereas we’re debt funded, so we have a different profile. I personally like debt myself because I’ve got six kids. I can do things like Sydney to Hobart. The problem with being equity funded is you’ve got a lot of pressure to worry about. You’ve got to worry about being turfed out at any point in time. You’ve got non-exec directors, you’ve got markets to report to.

“Whereas, if you’re debt funded, all you have to worry about is your EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation). Now our EBITDA is going better than ever, so we don’t really have a problem.”