What's in a name?

Our pachyderm's name

Several people have asked us, “why Elefant?”. There’s two answers to this: a short one and a long one.

The short answer is that the name “Elephant” was already taken when we incorporated our company in 2023. So, we went with the next best thing, which was “Elefant”. “Elefant” is, by the way, the real name of the animal in German (it’s also the name of a heavy tank-destroyer, but that’s not what we’re getting at).

That probably still doesn’t answer the question. “Alright,” you may be thinking, “but what do elephants have to do with legaltech?” This requires the long answer.

When we first started thinking about doing our own thing, we were focused on solving problems for people like us - that was, after all, what we knew. Alex had been in prosecution for several years and Ian had also done a stint as a prosecutor. One problem that we thought we could tackle was sentencing precedents - that is, finding previous similar cases to inform a court about what the punishment for a convicted offender should be.

Offences, the criminal law term for crimes, usually specify a maximum punishment term. For example, the offence of cheating under section 417 of the Penal Code 1871 is a maximum of three years’ imprisonment, a fine, or both. However, not everyone gets the maximum punishment - the maximum punishment is reserved for the worst class of offenders. Instead, most people get something closer to the average punishment, what we call the tariff. But the tariff is not defined in statute, you have to infer it by looking at previous cases and figuring out the pattern.

This isn’t easy to do, because most cases don’t actually get reported in the Law Reports. The Law Reports only report on a selection of cases, usually those in the High Court or Court of Appeal or cases with some novel point of law or high level public interest. But a huge number of average cases go unreported.

The first iteration of Elefant was conceptualised as a sentencing tool. It would help users retrieve precedent cases, compiled from various sources like newspaper reports and case reports available from open sources, like the e-Litigation website. Elefant would then help the user to download and package those sources, and also compile a table of sentencing precedents - that is, it would summarise the sources and compile them into a single table showing the facts of each case and the sentence imposed.

Hence the name, “Elefant”! As the saying goes, “an elephant never forgets”, and what we were building was a product that could help search the collective memory of the internet to unearth relevant precedents. We thought this tool could be helpful not only to lawyers, but also potentially to journalists or researchers, looking for similar cases that might not otherwise be easy to find.

But even this, rather modest, idea proved to be difficult - these were the days before ChatGPT and the generative AI revolution. It was hard to develop an automated method of reading and extracting information from reports, and then summarising and synthesizing that into a usable table.

So, we decided on something even more modest - we’d settle for simply creating a search engine that would allow users to perform legal research on cases, statutes, newspaper reports, and parliamentary records (called Hansard) simultaneously. In the current paradigm, statutes are on Singapore Statutes Online, cases on e-Litigation, newspaper reports on their own websites, and Hansard on the Parliament website. It seemed to us really ridiculous that the user journey was so fragmented.

In this way, we arrived at another meaningful connection to the name, “Elefant”. There’s a parable about a group of blind men who were asked to feel something and say what it was - the first said it was a snake, the second said it was a pillar, and the third said it was a rope. But they were all wrong - it was an elephant! The first man had felt its trunk, the second its leg, and the third its tail.

The point of the parable being that you can’t necessarily tell the truth of a thing unless you see the whole picture, not just a part. And that’s exactly what Elefant, in its current form, allows you to do - see the whole picture with a single search.