A couple of characteristics stand out when two William & Mary computer science professors are asked to describe Lingfei “Teddy” Wu Ph.D. ’16. • “I remember Lingfei as tenacious,” says Evgenia Smirni, computer science department chair and Sidney P. Chockley Professor. • “He will work day and night to succeed in any task,” agrees Andreas Stathopoulos, Wu’s doctoral program advisor. “And while scientists are skeptics by training — or by nature — Lingfei brings a rare optimism to the table. This powers him through any adversity and he always succeeds.” • Wu draws on both qualities as the cofounder and CEO of Anytime AI, a new startup that ventures into the developing frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal field.
Channeling the Force of AI
Hearing the professors’ descriptions, Wu laughs. “I would use a different word. I call it persistence when you feel your inner calling about something and you have a passion to do that,” he says. “If you want to be a top expert and do it well, you need a lot of persistence and hard work.”
A Present Necessity
After spending the early part of his career leading a research team at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center focused on machine-learning tasks such as speech recognition, Wu moved to more directly consumer-oriented companies such as Pinterest.
Feeling the pull of entrepreneurship, he decided to apply his knowledge of machine learning to create a platform that uses artificial intelligence to help law firms work more efficiently. He launched Anytime AI, marketed as “the premier AI legal assistant for plaintiff lawyers,” in October 2023.
Defined as technology allowing computers to perform complex tasks that typically have been done by humans, AI is both celebrated and feared as it increasingly permeates 21st-century life. In a TEDx presentation last July, Wu described AI as the most recent of two dozen technologies that have revolutionized human society over the past 10,000 years — among them wheels, printing, railways, electricity and the internet.
“We are standing at the threshold of another transformative era,” he told the audience at California Science and Technology University. “AI will bring unprecedented efficiency and capabilities to every industry, including the legal industry. Adoption of AI is no longer a future consideration but a present necessity.”
Wu sees AI as increasing efficiency for law firms, meaning they can do more work without adding staff members. He is optimistic that this will make legal services accessible to more people by reducing the costs for clients.
As an example, he says a legal service that typically would require four lawyers working 10 hours a day for six weeks at $400 per hour could be done using AI with three lawyers in three weeks working eight hours a day. Even if the firm increases its hourly rate from $400 to $500, the overall cost for a client would drop from $480,000 to $180,000.
While it might take a lawyer four hours to summarize 100 pages of depositions, this task can be done in one minute using AI, including highlighting key facts and citing original page numbers, he says. His company, Anytime AI, works with many personal injury firms, and he says that AI can analyze 1,000 pages of medical records and extract key information in 15 minutes — something that would take a person at least 15 hours.
Read the full article in William and Mary Magazine