Benjamin Alarie on education
From Benjamin Alarie CEO & Founder at Blue J about building in Toronto #techto #startups #toronto · · TechTO
“Teaching 100 students a year at tax law at the University of Toronto is awesome, but 99% of them immediately start forgetting tax law the moment they end typing their final exam. I think maybe we should start training a computer, you know, an expert system using machine learning to really understand the law.”
On , Benjamin Alarie, Cofounder at Blue J, spoke about education during Benjamin Alarie CEO & Founder at Blue J about building in Toronto #techto #startups #toronto on TechTO.
About Benjamin Alarie
Benjamin Alarie, co-founder and CEO of Blue J, spoke about the founding of his company and the role of machine learning in law. In a 2025 TechTO appearance, he recalled approaching Daniel Dau with the idea that machine learning could transform law, noting that while teaching tax law at the University of Toronto, he observed that most students quickly forgot the material after exams. He described his goal of training a computer to understand the law as a "common resource for everyone." Alarie also credited the Creative Destruction Lab as a valuable resource for startups in Toronto. In a 2018 TEDx talk, Alarie outlined a five-stage vision for legal technology, culminating in a "legal singularity" where 99 percent of legal uncertainty is eliminated, making much litigation superfluous. He stated that Blue J's algorithms can predict court outcomes with up to 94 percent accuracy, compared to lawyers' conventional accuracy of 60 to 70 percent. Alarie described the current legal system as producing "too much printed material" and argued that artificial intelligence offers a solution, making the law "more transparent, more accessible, more fair, more just."