What we talked about
In this episode of the PreVetted Podcast, we sit down with Dr. Tanguy Chau, Founder and CEO of Paxton, the AI-powered legal platform making waves in the industry by helping lawyers work 10x more efficiently.
With a PhD from MIT and a background in engineering, venture capital, and early-stage investments in groundbreaking companies like Ironclad, Tanguy brings a rare blend of technical precision and business insight to the world of legal tech.
Show notes
Tanguy Chau makes a point that turns out to be more alarming than it first sounds: when lawyers were sanctioned for citing cases that do not exist, most of them had actually asked ChatGPT to verify the case, and ChatGPT had confidently confirmed it was real. He calls it a sophisticated liar, not a lazy tool, but a system that doubles down convincingly. That is why a general-purpose AI is not just inadequate for legal work; it is actively dangerous.
What we covered
- Paxton started with legal research because the dominant incumbents, Westlaw and LexisNexis, required Boolean query syntax and multi-year contracts that put serious research tools out of reach for small and mid-sized firms. Translating natural language questions into a cumbersome query language was a barrier that AI could eliminate entirely.
- Hallucination in the legal context has three distinct forms: inventing a case that does not exist, correctly citing a case but misrepresenting what it actually says, and citing a case that has been overturned by a later court ruling. Paxton built a shepardization system to address the third problem, running millions of cases through large language models to determine which decisions are still valid law, a task that previously required hundreds of millions of dollars in manual editorial labor.
- Paxton operates on its own curated database of statutes, regulations, and court rulings rather than generating from a foundational model. When a case is cited, users can click through to see the actual source document and which court published it. The AI has its own knowledge of the law, it is not simply wrapping ChatGPT.
- The product-led growth approach, free trial, no sales call required, cancel anytime, has resulted in deployment across multiple thousands of law firms globally, including Am Law 100 firms. Tanguy argues this is only possible because small firms battle-tested and sharpened the product before the larger ones arrived.
- From his time as an investor in companies like Ironclad and Case Text (acquired by Thomson Reuters), Tanguy’s clearest lesson for founders is that the counterintuitive move is to narrow relentlessly. Investors want a huge market, but product-market fit comes from solving one specific problem for one specific type of user before expanding. The diagnostic question he uses: what do you do uniquely that people are desperate for?
- His prediction for the next five years: it will become an ethical breach for a lawyer not to use AI. The efficiency and accuracy gains are so large that failing to adopt the best available tools would be a failure of duty to clients.
About Tanguy
Dr. Tanguy Chau is the founder and CEO of Paxton, an AI-powered legal research and drafting platform. He holds a PhD from MIT and brings a decade of legal tech investing experience, including early-stage investments in Ironclad and Case Text.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanguychau
- Website: https://www.paxton.ai
Episode 48 of the PreVetted Podcast.