IMFD Innovation Project obtains StartUp Science 2025 funding
The project "Intelligent Assistant for the Analysis of Formal Sources of Law," with which the IMFD Innovation team proposes a tool for managing the legal sources used in Chile, obtained the StartUp Ciencia 2025 fund, awarded by ANID.
"Thanks to the implementation of various projects in this area, as well as interaction with various actors in the legal world, we are prepared to address a real problem that exists in the legal field," says Hernán Sarmiento, director of the IMFD Innovation area. StartUp Ciencia funds seek to support the creation and growth of science and technology-based companies through co-financing, technical validation, and business validation. "It is a competitive process, as Chile has a very powerful ecosystem that is seeking to advance the use of technologies in various areas of the country, so we are delighted to have this support, which will allow us to bring the work carried out at the Millennium Institute a los Datos even closer to a part of our society," emphasizes the director.
About the project: Fragmentation of the legal sources of law
In the area of national law, there is a wide dispersion of formal sources of information: for example, in sectors such as real estate law, the lack of centralization of relevant documents, such as building permits and municipal decrees, greatly complicates the work of lawyers. This is repeated in all areas, and although there are tools such as vLex or WestLaw that centralize documents and information from the legal sector, documents lower down in the regulatory hierarchy have to be obtained and analyzed manually. This is one of the fundamental bases of the project: to highlight the value of data that, although available, is also scattered. "Keeping legal sources up to date is time-consuming and resource-intensive, especially for law firms. Having this information is vital for making informed decisions based on existing case law," explains the director.
Current tools, such as advances in the field of artificial intelligence, especially the processing of documents in multiple formats—an area in which the work of IMFD researchers stands out—or the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), allow the IMFD Innovation team to create and make available the implementation of an intelligent agent that searches for and downloads legal documents, so that it can then learn from them. "This will enable search, reporting, and consultation tasks to be performed on these documents. Our intelligent agent will serve law firms and other companies as an efficient alternative for keeping their information up to date and carrying out their workflows," Sarmiento points out.
In its initial stage, the project will focus on real estate law, with the aim of validating the technology before scaling it up to other areas and other countries in the region. "One of the critical issues we face when working on projects applied to specific problems is that the models are developed in different contexts. That is why it is so important to have developments adapted to the realities of each problem," emphasizes Hernán Sarmiento.
On the scientific side, we hope to introduce modern and advanced technologies into the legal sector in Chile, so that we can contribute to the country's legal security. We will implement intelligent agents that will leverage cutting-edge techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and explainability mechanisms, which will not only modernize the legal sector, but also advance the state of the art in making intelligent agents able to explain how they formulate a response.
The IMFD Innovation area aims to promote the technology transfer of research carried out at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, in order to apply the most effective techniques based on cutting-edge science and technology, seeking to extract value from data, promoting the development of Chile and the region, and providing data solutions for industry, the public sector, and society. Our distinguishing feature is our ability to link scientific knowledge with engineering and development.