Today Fastcase and Ross Intelligence are announcing a content, research and development partnership which the founders expect to drive innovation for both companies. Fastcase which is celebrating its 20th anniversary has excently expanded beyond its primary law focus into analytics, legal news and secondary source publishing and alliances. Ross which made headlines with its A.I. search engine for legal research has recently launched its law school program and begun building alliances with bar associations and with Clio practice management software.

I interviewed Ed Walters CEO and Co- Founder of Fastcase about this new alliance. Walters describes this alliance in terms of a major market shift in the legal research and technology space. “In the 1990s the main way market dominance was building gigantic silos of data” epitomized by the Lexis and Westlaw platforms. According to Walters “The future will be owned by small, nimble companies that have inter-operable parts. The Fastcase-Ross alliance is about creating a new paradigm for the next 10 years.”

Ross will gain access to the Fastcase pipeline of case law, statutes and regulations across all 50 states. Walters described t he benefits of the alliance in the press release. Fastcase will benefit from Ross’s “trailblazing work in the field of natural language processing in machine learning. The partnership will enable Fastcase to collaborate on exciting new products and jointly create new solutions for unmet needs of the legal profession.”

Lexis and Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) invented the online legal research market and have dominated it for years. Bloomberg Law has faced substantial headwinds since entering the market in 2013 and has not substantially eroded the incumbents market share. Fastcase has grown and gained a substantial hold in the smaller and mid-firm market. Could this “nimble alliance strategy” finally push them into direct competition with Lexis and Westlaw? Customers who are frustrated with the pricing and marketing practices of Lexis and Westlaw reconsider their options every time they face a renewal. Fastcase is clearly positioning the company to play the disruptor.

Here is the full press release:

ROSS Intelligence and Fastcase Announce Partnership
Legal Research Innovators to Exchange Technology Tools and Data

San Francisco, CA and Washington, DC (December 3, 2019) – ROSS Intelligence and Fastcase today announced a content, research, and development partnership enabling both parties to innovate more quickly to the benefit of lawyers, firms, and bar associations that they serve. As a result of the Fastcase partnership ROSS has achieved data completeness within its platform, which now contains case law, statutes, and regulations across all 50 states. Fastcase and ROSS will be progressively developing additional product integrations and joint features, to be released in the coming months.

“When we started ROSS Intelligence, we understood natural language processing and machine learning would afford new entrants the opportunity to innovate. We also soon realized how daunting the task of building, collecting, and updating caselaw, statutes, and regulations across 50 states would be. By partnering with Fastcase we have the opportunity to tie into their strong data pipeline, as well as work with a constant innovator in the legal publishing space. Fastcase encourages startups across the ecosystem and has developed an extremely large and devoted client base over the last twenty years,” said Andrew Arruda, CEO and Co-founder of ROSS. “We’re thrilled to further cement our partnership with Fastcase, allowing us to not only deepen our legal data repository on the ROSS platform, but to also put our artificial intelligence technology in front of Fastcase’s 900,000 plus subscribers. And this is all just the very beginning of what is to come.”

“We’ve long admired the ROSS team, along with their passion, energy and trailblazing work in the field of natural language processing and machine learning,” said Ed Walters, CEO and co-founder of Fastcase. “This partnership with ROSS allows us to collaborate on exciting, new products to the benefit of Fastcase customers. It also allows us to jointly create new solutions for unaddressed needs in the legal profession.”

Heading into 2020, by partnering with ROSS, Fastcase continues to build out its suite of legal research, productivity, and workflow software. “When the market hit a tough patch in 2008, the first wave of large law firms moving from a dual to sole-research provider option were based mainly on cost savings. Today, we’re seeing the second wave emerge, and it’s all about replacing redundant services with must-have firm friendly innovative solutions,” said Steve Errick, COO of Fastcase. “We’re excited to partner with ROSS as we build a network of innovative solutions and peer publishers working together to delight our shared clients.”

This announcement comes shortly after the announcement of ROSS Intelligence’s partnership with Clio’s practice management software earlier this month, as well as ROSS Intelligence’s announcement of its partnership with The Florida Bar in June 2019 and their release just last week of free unlimited ROSS access to law students and faculty members across the United States.

In addition to its growing roster of business partnerships, ROSS has continued to quietly build a world-class team of talented developers, including the addition of technology leader Stergios Anastasiadis as Head of Engineering, formerly the Director of Engineering at Shopify, where Stergios led all engineering efforts through to the company’s tremendously successful IPO.

“We have always respected the position Fastcase has established in legal publishing and data. Our partnership will allow us to more aggressively accelerate our pace of innovation, build out our team, and benefit the entire legal ecosystem, from lawyers to clients,” said Jimoh Ovbiagele, CTO and Co-founder of ROSS.

About Fastcase
As a leading legal publisher, Fastcase democratizes the law, making it more accessible to more people. Using patented software that combines the best of legal research with citation analysis and data visualization, Fastcase helps busy users sift through the clutter, ranking the best cases first and enabling the re-sorting of results to find answers fast. Founded in 1999, Fastcase has more than 900,000 subscribers from around the world. Fastcase is an American company based in Washington, D.C. For more information, follow Fastcase on Twitter at @Fastcase, or visit www.fastcase.com.

About ROSS Intelligence
Founded in 2015, ROSS Intelligence is the industry-leading AI-driven legal research provider. ROSS’s legal research platform leverages proprietary AI technology to help lawyers conduct more thorough research in a fraction of the time. ROSS is funded by tier-one investors, including iNovia Capital, Comcast Ventures, and Y-Combinator, and was recognized by the American Bar Association as “an example of how artificial intelligence can be used to improve the delivery of legal services.” For Additional Information on ROSS Intelligence, follow ROSS on Twitter at @ROSSIntel or visit www.rossintelligence.com