Jean-Rémi de Maistre (Jus Mundi): “To succeed in the tech world, you have to be a bit of a hot-head”

The year is 2013. Jean-Rémi de Maistre is preparing a doctoral thesis on international public law instruments for internet governance. He entered law school late in life, after a false start in finance. “A first internship in a trading room in the midst of the 2008 crisis,” was perhaps not the best time to be cutting one’s teeth in the finance world, he conceded.

De Maistre took on a series of odd jobs before entering the University of Nanterre to study law. Having always been attracted to the idea of becoming a lawyer, he never actually donned the robe, but spent six years practicing international law alongside his professor “one of the world's leading arbitration lawyers” Alain Pellet.

We work with institutions in over 50 countries and have clients in 90 countries

Aside from being a good way of financing his PhD other than lecturing part time at the university, this job convinced him of the importance of international law. According to de Maistre, its usefulness is still valid today, and he is not convinced by the alternative based on power-dynamics between states. “It’s wise to stabilize the balance of power in the law,” he remarks. The proof is in the (mostly) high quality of international relations since 1945 ─ if we turn a blind eye to the growing tensions of this new century.  

Law meets tech
So, along with Thomas Latterner, Grégoire and Valentin Brondel, Aurélien Duval and Yohan Daddou, the ex-financier set about compiling data on international commercial law and arbitration, the preferred method of resolving commercial disputes. He then discovered the tech world, which he qualifies as “very competitive and fast-moving. You have to be a bit of a hothead”. Since 2018, when the Jus Mundi platform was launched, he has been traveling the world to convince institutions and law firms to be part of the project, while guaranteeing their confidentiality.

“We work with institutions in over 50 countries and have clients in 90 countries” – clients that include international law firms, British and American, for the most part. Another initiative from the founders of Jus Mundi is Jus Connect, a platform that collects profiles of arbitration professionals. This Who’s Who of the arbitration world has the great advantage of preventing conflicts of interest by indicating who has already worked on what.

And what about AI? Already used to enabling data collection and anonymization for Jus Mundi, it is at the heart of a tool developed by the legaltech company to simplify legal research and drafting. Unlike the CEOs of certain other tech companies, De Maistre is not afraid of regulating this booming technology, quite the contrary in fact, “We didn’t regulate the internet 20 years ago, and look what a disaster that turned out to be.” He does not subscribe to the “libertarian fiction” prevalent in Silicon Valley, where people are allergic to regulation. According to the French entrepreneur, America has left the power of regulation in the hands of Google, X and Facebook. Not to regulate AI, when it is already contributing to judicial decisions, amounts to “shooting ourselves in the foot”.

He welcomes AI's contribution to justice, however. In fact, tests are currently underway in certain arbitration institutions that would allow algorithms to be used to assist arbitrators in taking into account the arguments of the parties. Another example is Jus Mundi’s ability to collect and translate legal arguments developed in Chinese. Going forward, the legaltech sees itself casting its net wider, to offer data in tax law and in environmental law, an up-and-coming field.