In less than six months, two of the remaining independent and reasonably priced legal research providers Fastcase and Casetext have been acquired or are in the process of being acquired.
Fastcase, which itself had acquired the analytics platform Docket Alarm has been absorbed into vLex, an interesting and innovative European start-up, which has been
Thomson Reuters’ deal to purchase Casetext has driven the legal tech hype cycle to a fever pitch. Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Casetext. I have been an admirer for over a decade. More than once, I have watched them not just beat the market, but redirect the market and invent whole new categories of legal research products. I have spent a lot of time over the past few years musing about innovation, new product categories and market advantage.
When Casetext created the “brief analysis” tool CARA, it was three years before even one of the largest legal information companies launched a brief analyzer and it was four years before all three,; Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and Bloomberg Law, had a brief analyzer on the market.
Note: vLex (Fastcase) launched the Vincent “brief checker” in the international market in 2018., two years after the launch of CARA. The above graphic was focused on the U. S. market.
Similarly, with Compose, Casetext introduced “parallel search” and a new category of concept searching was born. Or as Casetext co-founder Pablo Arredondo likes to exclaim “parallel search freed lawyers from the prison of the keyword.” This time The market responded in less than two years. LexisNexis launched “Fact and issue Finder” which leveraged extractive AI technology built on a highly tailored version of Google’s BERT to present insights to researchers. Westlaw responded with Westlaw Precision built with a large editorial team to help with machine learning. The response time in the market is growing shorter.
Industry Insiders’ Perspectives I have spoken to several legal tech industry insiders and the consensus seems to be that within 6 to 12 months, Thomson Reuters’ competitors Lexis, Bloomberg Law, and vLex (formerly Fastcase) are likely to have developed capabilities which can compete with CoCounsel. No one is starting from scratch. According to Ed Walters, Chief Strategy Officer at vLex, “we already have global AI products in the labs. We don’t release vaporware, but these products are coming no matter who owns Casetext.”
On Wednesday night, Casetext continued to celebrate the launch of their Generative AI platform, CoCounsel with a special “Invitation only” event during LegalWeek in New York. CoCounsel is powered by OpenAI’s GPT 4 and was the first AI technology to successfully pass a bar exam.
The event included a demo of a new CoCounsel workflow for transactional lawyers called “Market Check,” a brief keynote by Stephen Gillers, Elihu Root Professor of Law Emeritus at NYU, a lively panel discussion about the legal business impact and ethical challenges of AI.
What is Market check? Pablo Arredondo, CoFounder and Chief Innovation Officer at Casetext introduced a live demo of Market Check. This new workflow uses the CoCounsel generative AI technology to analyze a corpus of transactional documents and identify the “market standard” for specific clause types. Currently Bloomberg Law and Intelligize both offer “what’s market” analysis on publicly available documents and enable lawyers to compare one or several draft documents with a market standard. Market check could enable a firm to analyze a custom corpus of internal and/or external documents and ask CoCounsel to deliver results in response to “plain English” questions.
Today Thomson Reuters is announcing the release of a new platform Westlaw Precision which promises to dramatically cut research time and
improve the quality of research results. Westlaw Precision will be sold as an upgrade to Westlaw Edge. Westlaw Precision is tackling the gnarly and perennial problem of language ambiguity by doubling down on taxonomy. At launch, Westlaw Precision covers 8 topics (Commercial law, Federal Civil Procedure, Federal Discovery and Evidence, Federal Remedies, Federal Class Actions, Employment, Securities, and Anti-trust.) Fifteen new topics will be released through 2023. Only the most recent 12 years of caselaw in each topic are included in search results.
Westlaw Precision includes 6 new features at launch. Precision Research is the “Star of the show.” The other 5 features offer cite checking or workflow enhancements.
“Our customers tell us difficult legal research can often take more than 10 hours per case,” said Mike Dahn, head of Product Management, Westlaw, Thomson Reuters. “It’s time consuming because they are often looking for something very precise, but traditional
Continue Reading Westlaw Precision Launches With Promise to Cut Lawyer Research Time in Half
There is no question that the most exciting place at AALL is the Exhibit Hall. Connect with old friends, schmooze with vendors, learn about exciting new features and products. 2022 is the first live, post pandemic AALL conference. I am anticipating that a highly energized crowd will be streaming through the exhibit hall. I
Respond to the 2020-21 What’s Hot and What’s Not Survey here. Although the world was shut down by the pandemic, our friends in
legal tech continued their pursuit of innovation and market share. Most of us had a sense of whiplash and disbelief when the world came to a virtual halt in March 2020. Law librarians who had built digital libraries over the years offered their attorneys a fairly seamless transition to their work from home desktop. Within weeks most legal publishers had developed a special COVID offering. These ranged from free alerts, to primary sources and workflow toolkits. Despite all of these efforts law librarians and knowledge managers faced a gap in COVID coverage. Almost overnight a “gray literature” emerged which major legal publishers were not
Continue Reading What’s Hot and What’s Not? Welcome to the Dewey B Strategic 2020-2021 Hits and Misses Survey
We all knew that law libraries were shrinking. No one suspected that they would be totally “done in” by a virus. Law libraries have been “going digital” for at least 20 years, but few firms tossed out their last “pocket part” update. But as firms plan their post-pandemic re-openings, retaining a collection of shared books is frankly a biohazard. Should 
librarians develop systems for sanitizing and quarantining books? In today’s digital world -– is it even worth the trouble?
Does anyone really want to take on the backlog of updating books that are nine months out of date next January when lawyers begin returning to offices?
For the past two decades, many law librarians have been assessing products and developing in-house solutions to support virtual library resources.
There is no universal solution. The law firms which have the foresight to invest in strategic information professionals are most likely to have had substantial digital libraries in place last March when COVID-19 brought the world to a screeching halt. Many firms are running parallel digital and print libraries because they are supporting both the last of the “baby boomer partners” and the “born digital” generation of lawyers. COVID-19 has been an unprecedented tipping point which exposes the importance of completing or starting a digital library transition plan.
12 Building Blocks Of A Digital Library
Continue Reading 12 Tips For Building Your Digital Law Library In The Age Of COVID-19
On Monday night Bloomberg Law hosted a “semi-secret” preview of their still to be named “brief analyzer.” I will cut to the chase and recommend “B Brief” as a name for the analysis tool. After all, the point of a brief analyzer is to make lawyers more efficient. The product is expected to be released as a beta test in September and to launch by the end of the year – depending on feedback from the beta testers. Bloomberg Law President Joe 
Breda and his executive team held an event in a “speak easy” style restaurant on Blagden Ally in the hipster heart of DC. A select group of librarian and tech journalist invitees received a mysterious key in a rather MI-5 invitation several weeks before the AALL Annual Meeting and Conference. In a darkened back room, the invitees received a preview of the “brief analyzer” product and were invited to give feedback.
Like other brief analyzers the process is launched by dropping and dragging a document into the analyzer tool. The tool extracts and analyses the citations, text and concepts in the document.
Bloomberg’s product demo focused on the workflow for analyzing an opponent’s brief rather than the process for finalizing a brief that is being drafted. Most of Bloomberg’s competitor’s in this space have launched their products focusing on the brief drafting process, the analysis of an adversary’s brief was included as an additional use case.
The bottom line is that for either process, the analyzer tool is designed to speed up the review process and help lawyers focus on the most important
Continue Reading Bloomberg Law Joins the Brief Analyser Party – With A Touch Of Intrigue
The first email comment I received regarding yesterday’s blogpost on the Casetext / National Legal Research Group report was from longtime legal publishing/technology veteran Richard Reiben. Reiben observed that just as the eskimos are reported to have 50 words for snow – he suggested we need ” 50 words for AI.” I agree, it
Correction: The original post listed an incorrect “click” and “open” rate which has been corrected below. Apologies to my readers.
Last May Casetext’s CARA launched their “brief finder” feature which they recently enhanced with a “push” notifications feature. THey recently released a new “push” notifications feature called “CARA Notifications” which analyzes Pacer dockets and