Ed Walters

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I have been following Fastcase since 2011 when I wrote a blogpost, highlighting their innovative approach to legal research which included visual timelines and a feature called “foresight” that identified relevant precedent without relying on keywords. Fastcase was the brainchild of co-founders  Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal, former big law associates who were driven by a passion to “democratize the law.”

Since 2011, I have written an astonishing 49 stories on my blog tracking Fastcase’s various upgrades, acquisitions and alliances.  Acquisitions include: Casemaker, Loislaw, Docket Alarm, Judicata’s “Legal genome,” TopForm, Next Chapter and Law Street Media. They expanded business intelligence, legal treatises, expert witness profiles, and corporate content by entering alliances with a host of companies, including Courtroom, Insight, JurisPro, the ABA, TransUnion, James Publishing , The Practicing Law Institute, Littler, Wolters, Kluwer, and Association of Immigration Lawyers and Matterhorn.

A year ago this month cast Fastcase merged with vLex,  the international research platform. I was really excited to talk to Ed Walters, Chief Strategy Officer at vLex and get his take on the vLex merger as well as the state of the legal tech market, advice for entrepreneurs and teaching robot law to next generation of lawyers.

O’Grady: It is a year since Fastcase merged with vLex. Has it been a win-win for both companies?

Walters: Fastcase was very successful as a 24-year-old bootstrapped company. We had not gotten a lot of outside financing, and we had grown Fastcase incrementally and responsibly as a profitable company. At the beginning of 2023 it was pretty clear, that we were coming into an age where “speed to market” and artificial intelligence were going to be more important than ever, and candidly, we just didn’t have the resources to compete as an independent, slow-growth company.

Continue reading on LegalTech HubContinue Reading The Fastcase/ vLex Merger – A Talk with Ed Walters on the State of the Legal Tech Market, Advice for Start-ups, Generative AI and Robot Law in Legal Education

Fastcase  which made it’s name as a low cost alternative to Lexis and Westlaw with an innovative search engine including  graphical timelines for analyzing caselaw has announced a move into the growing legal process improvement and  workflow arena.

www.fastcase.comToday LexisNexis and Fastcase announced that the Collier TopForm & File product will now be provided exclusively by Fastcase and

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This is the first alignment of independent legal publishers that I can recall.. As a consumer of  legal information, I appreciate the importance of small publishers in the legal information ecosphere. Past  publishing partnerships involved companies of wildly disproportionate size and market power. This partnership has delightful symmetry and counterpoint (Hein offers  deep archive

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There are two things that surprised me about the Fastcase release of advance sheets which was announced last week.

1. Faster to the ebook market. Once again  Fastcase has leapfrogged over many well established legal publishers by jumping into the eBook market. Last year at AALL, only the two largest  legal publishers LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, were

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