In short: HAQQ co-founder and CEO Antoine Kanaan sat down for a TV interview about why legal AI belongs in everyone's pocket. The thesis is simple. Of 8 billion people on Earth, more than 5 billion have no real access to justice, mostly because it is too expensive. A domain-specific legal AI, free to start, can hand people the first step. It does not replace a lawyer. It gets you to one prepared.
Everything in our lives got fast. Information, work, the decisions we make every day. One field stayed slow and intimidating: the law. Texts we do not understand, contracts we sign unsure, and a lawyer we can only reach at a high cost and after a long wait. Antoine Kanaan, CEO and co-founder of HAQQ (“your right” in Arabic), wants to break that equation: a legal AI in everyone's pocket that understands the laws of every country, in every language, and answers whenever you need it, even at 3 a.m.
Antoine Kanaan, CEO and co-founder of HAQQ, on legal AI and access to justice.
The name carries the mission
HAQQ means “your right” in Arabic, and the conviction behind it is clearer still: it is every person's right to reach their rights, and technology is what will put those rights in their own hands. The app downloads to your phone. Open it, and you find a legal AI that understands the law wherever you are in the world. It gives you a legal answer, reviews a document, drafts a contract, or explains what you owe and what you are owed in any situation.
Not a replacement for a lawyer, the first step toward one
Kanaan draws the line plainly. HAQQ does not replace your lawyer; in sensitive cases you must always consult one. What the app delivers is the first step on the road to justice, the stage where most people are stuck because they cannot read a document or cannot afford a consultation. Photograph a contract, ask the app to explain, analyze, and advise. Then take that understanding to a lawyer and confirm it. The difference is that you no longer walk into the room blind.
The law spares no one for ignorance. That is why everyone needs someone in their pocket who can help them and explain their obligations and their rights. (Antoine Kanaan, CEO and Co-Founder of HAQQ)
The justice gap: five out of eight
The number driving the whole project is stark. Of 8 billion people on Earth, more than 5 billion have no real access to justice, a figure traced to the World Justice Project's work on the global justice gap. The first reason is cost. Justice is expensive, so most people never reach it.
HAQQ's answer is to give it away. A legal AI that knows the laws of the world, resolves and drafts contracts, and explains rights and duties, free to start, on the phone already in your hand. That reach, Kanaan argues, is the fastest path between an ordinary person and their rights.
From free information to free services
Kanaan frames the shift with a comparison to what happened to information itself. You used to buy a ten-dollar book for an answer; now you search and it is free. AI does the same thing one layer up, not to information, but to the doing.
Think about what Google did to information. You used to buy a book for ten dollars; now you search and it's free. The difference now is this: Google gives you information when you ask. AI gives you services when you ask. (Antoine Kanaan, CEO and Co-Founder of HAQQ)
Reading a statute never drafted anyone's contract or assessed anyone's risk. The bottleneck was always the doing, not the knowing, and that is the part AI now makes cheap.
The economics of a $500 contract
The gap is not abstract. It shows up as arithmetic every time someone decides whether a contract is worth paying for.
Most people won't pay 500 dollars for a contract. Sometimes not even 100. If the deal itself is worth 200, paying more than that for the paperwork makes no sense, so it just doesn't happen, and people go unprotected. (Antoine Kanaan, CEO and Co-Founder of HAQQ)
Drop the cost of a first draft toward zero and that math flips: the $200 job can finally afford a contract, and the handshake can be written down.
Why start from Lebanon?
HAQQ was founded in Lebanon and is now used by more than 12,000 users across 200 countries, a company that started Lebanese and turned global. Kanaan's vision for the country runs wider than the company itself: Lebanon exports its brains, so if those brains stay home and are funded with capital, nothing stops them from building companies that export their services and products to the whole world. The model he wants is not to export the minds, but to keep them, fund them, and let them export instead.
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Can we trust AI?
Many people do not, and general-purpose AI does get things wrong. Kanaan separates a general tool from a specialized one. Relying on a general chatbot for legal information is relying on something that cannot be relied on. HAQQ's AI is built for the law: it has studied the laws of more than 80 jurisdictions, and it knows the legal language and the requirements of each case. No one is immune to error, neither human nor machine, but a tool trained on the law errs far less and delivers far more. So the rule holds: when there is liability on the line, bring in a lawyer.
The lawyer who will not use AI gets left behind
Before HAQQ launched to the public, it launched to lawyers first. The conviction was, and remains, that a lawyer must be armed with AI. The numbers explain why: five contracts in five minutes, across five tabs at once. No lawyer does that by hand. The review still belongs to the lawyer, but the cost and the time collapse. Refusing the tool, Kanaan says, is like refusing a calculator and insisting on doing the math by hand.
The lawyer who refuses to use AI gets left behind while the world moves ahead. They have a duty to give their client the best service, and they cannot do that without this tool. (Antoine Kanaan, CEO and Co-Founder of HAQQ)
A message to young builders
Asked what he would tell people who have ideas but never act on them out of fear of failing, Kanaan was direct: there is risk in everything you do, and a chance you will not succeed, but whoever tries and fails just ends up back where they started, having lost nothing. On the region, he is blunter still. If anything has held us back in the Middle East, it is fear, fear for people and fear for jobs. AI is the most important invention humanity has made in the last two or three thousand years. If we do not make use of it now, then when?
How to use it, and what it costs
Like any modern AI tool, you start free, then move to a paid tier based on how much you use it, a credit system similar to ChatGPT or Claude. Compared with a lawyer's fee for a simple task like reviewing a contract, the cost can be a fraction of the price. Alongside the free service for individuals, HAQQ works with companies and government bodies across the Arab world, offering legal AI as a service. The future, in Kanaan's words: we will not stop until every person can reach the law and reach their rights.
Key takeaways
- More than 5 billion of the world's 8 billion people lack real access to justice, mostly because it is too expensive.
- HAQQ puts a domain-specific legal AI in everyone's pocket, free to start, as the first step toward justice, not a replacement for a lawyer.
- A legal-specific AI trained on the law errs far less than a general chatbot, but liability-bearing matters still need a licensed lawyer.
- Lawyers who adopt AI compress cost and time dramatically; those who refuse get left behind.
- HAQQ started in Lebanon and now serves more than 12,000 users across 200 countries, with a model of keeping and funding talent at home.
Try it on your own situation: HAQQ Legal AI is free to download on iPhone and Android, with native Arabic and English support. HAQQ is not a law firm and does not provide legal representation. Always consult a licensed lawyer for final legal decisions.
