It takes a fresh perspective to cause positive disruption. It necessitates someone like Kamil Debbagh who became disillusioned with his studies focused on law to find a new path for himself. Specifically for Mr. Debbagh, that meant working with French company Doctrine who specializes in the use of AI to aid legal professionals. Law, by definition, embraces tradition and conservatism; not exactly congruent with Kamil’s sensibilities. Empowered by his legal degree and motivated by a desire to innovate, Kamil found his way to Doctrine, one of the most successful French startups of the past decade and a standout in the global legal tech landscape, making it the perfect bridge between Debbagh’s passion for law and his drive for innovation. The fruit of this paring is seen in the creation of programs like the Split View which takes a tech-based approach to an age-old problem. The Split View enables users to navigate large amounts of information in an innovative way, leveraging what digital interfaces and human-machine interactions offer—something print media cannot.
Kamil Debbagh concedes that he gets looks of surprise when he tells how a video game led him to the concept a game changing concept for legal work. He reveals, “At the time, my squad at Doctrine was working on a product called the BOFIP, a comprehensive corpus of French tax regulations. Our goal was to integrate this content into the platform in a way that differentiated it from the official source. The team at Doctrine was highly focused on finding unique solutions, and the idea came to me during the Christmas holidays of 2022 while playing the video game Crusader Kings 3. Crusader Kings 3 is a complex game with exceptional in-game documentation, resembling an encyclopedia. It solves a common problem: encountering technical terms within the text that need further explanation. The game allows users to hover over a term, revealing a small tooltip with a definition. You can then continue hovering within the tooltip to explore related terms in a cascading, seamless flow. This experience felt intuitive and inspired me to explore similar functionality for navigating the BOFIP. With my team, we launched into a spree of R&D, experimenting with different ways to navigate, represent, and connect references within the text without losing context. This approach brought new life to our project, transforming how users interacted with dense regulatory content and ensuring a more fluid and engaging user experience.” The result of the Split View is that it allows a more focused means of discovery for legal professionals. Online, users often end up opening multiple tabs, losing track of the original context as each article refers to more texts. To address this, the Split View’s interface allows users to open referenced articles side-by-side with the original text. This eliminates the need for new tabs and helps maintain context, offering a more elegant and seamless user experience.
While the Split View is intuitive to use, arriving at its final version was a far more complicated series of progressions. At the heart of the research was interviews with various groups of lawyers to identify pain points which would guide the approach of Doctrine. Kamil’s team led the process developing what would become the Split View and cement Doctrine’s reputation for delivering user-centric, high-value features, reinforcing its leadership in the legal technology market. By streamlining workflow, the Split View dramatically enhanced the overall experience for users. This seemingly small change resonated in a large way with users to further illustrate to the professional legal community that Doctrine was committed to leading innovation at every step. This is the kind of change that only occurs when experience partners with the desire to explore. Kamil Debbagh comments, “What makes the Split View so interesting is its uncompromising approach to solving a problem I deeply felt as a law student. Navigating legal websites often meant opening countless tabs, losing track of references, and dealing with a cascade of cross-references that caused constant frustration. Explaining this pain to engineers, designers, and colleagues without a formal legal background was challenging—they hadn’t experienced the headache firsthand. But for lawyers, this was a visceral problem, and addressing it became a mission. I’m very pleased at what we’ve created for two reasons: it goes a long way towards helping lawyers, and it is continued evidence of what we can achieve at Doctrine as we harness the power of modern technology.”
Sharon Howe is a creative person with diverse talents. She writes engaging articles for WonderWorldSpace.com, where she works as a content writer. Writing allows Sharon to inform and captivate readers. Additionally, Sharon pursues music as a hobby, which allows her to showcase her artistic abilities in another creative area.