The legal technology company Casetext celebrates its 10th anniversary today. In a blog post the company published today, it describes itself as “a ten-year overnight success.” That sums it up well. Like many startups, its path to success has taken it on detours along the way. The company it started as in 2013 is not the company it is today.
In fact, as I described in my very first post about Casetext, its original vision was a crowdsourced case law library that its users would edit and annotate and then have other users upvote or downvote the annotations. Think a marriage of Wikipedia and Digg, but for law.
The crowdsourcing concept did not work out. But today, led by its three cofounders pictured above, Casetext is one of the leaders in the use of AI in law. In fact, with its recent launch of CoCounsel, an AI legal assistant developed in partnership with OpenAI and using the latest version of OpenAI’s GPT large language model, it has become the generative AI company to beat in the legal market.
Having followed Casetext’s growth since its start through this blog. I thought it would be illustrative to pull together all my posts about it from over the last 10 years. There are 49 that I found, and together they offer an overview of how a legal tech startup evolves into a mature company.
While its focus has changed over the years, one characteristic has not: From the very start, Casetext was an innovator, always pushing the envelope for what a legal tech product and company should look like. By doing that, it has been always a trailblazer, never a follower.
Well before launching CoCounsel this year, it had already launched the powerful neural net search technology AllSearch and had pioneered products such as Compose, to help lawyers draft litigation briefs, and, in 2016, CARA, the first product to use AI to analyze briefs, which spawned a generation of copycat products.
So here, starting 10 years ago, is a history of Casetext through my blog posts.
2013
New Legal Research Site Combines Case Law with Crowdsourcing.
Casetext Adds Crowdsourced Q&As.
2014
Two Sites Offer Platforms for Crowdsourced Legal Research.
Casetext Adds Citator, Other Features.
WellSettled.com Mines Cases for Established Principles.
Casetext Prepares to Add ‘Communities’.
Casetext Launches Community Pages, Adds Other Features.
2015
Crowdsourced Research Site Casetext Raises $7M Series A Financing.
Casetext Launches LegalPad, A Writing and Publishing Tool for Lawyers.
The Failure of Crowdsourcing in Law (So Far, At Least).
Round-up: News From Firm Manager, Casetext and Alt Legal (Who?).
Casetext’s Crowdsourced Citator Gains Traction, Passes 67,000 Entries.
2016
Casetext’s New Features Help You More Easily Get to the Essence of A Case.
New Casetext Feature Finds Relevant Cases For You, But Along With It Will Come New Pricing.
2017
Legal Research Company Casetext Closes on $12 Million in Funding.
Law Librarians Name Casetext’s CARA as New Product of the Year.
Casetext Expands Its CARA Research Assistant, Adding Suggestions Of Relevant Briefs.
Turns Out Legal Research Services Vary Widely in Results.
Casetext Now Automatically ‘Pushes’ Legal Research to Attorneys.
2017: The Year of Women in Legal Tech.
2018
Casetext Adds New Databases to Help Zero In On Black Letter Law and Key Holdings.
Robot Fight: Casetext’s CARA vs. ROSS’s EVA.
Casetext Just Made Legal Research A Whole Lot Smarter.
In Survey, Judges Say Lawyers’ Incomplete Research Impacts Case Outcomes.
World Economic Forum’s List of ‘Technology Pioneers’ Includes Just One from Legal.
Seeking To Expand Among Smaller Firms, Legal Research Service Casetext Adds Features, Lowers Price.
LawNext Episode 3: Casetext’s Founders on their Quest to Make Legal Research Affordable.
Winners Announced of 2018 ‘Changing Lawyer’ Awards.
Study Says Casetext Beats LexisNexis for Research, But LexisNexis Calls Foul.
2019
Casetext’s New ‘SmartCite’ Citator Is Its Clever Answer to Shepard’s and KeyCite.
Price Wars in Legal Research Mean Deals for Small Firms; I Compare Costs.
Casetext Adds Public Records Search through Partnership with Tracers.
Robot Wars Round 2: Faux Face Off of the AI-Driven Brief-Analysis Tools.
Five Legaltech Finalists Named for Clio’s $100,000 Launch//Code Contest.
2020
Notable New Casetext Product Drafts Your Litigation Briefs For You.
Top Law Firm Invests $8.2M in Legal Research Company Casetext.
Legal Tech Companies Offer Free Products In Civil Rights Cases.
Casetext Study Says Its ‘Compose’ Technology Cuts Brief-Writing Time By 76%.
Casetext Brings AI-Driven Brief Drafting to Employment Law.
Casetext Add-In Enables Automated Brief Drafting in Microsoft Word.
Now You Can Automatically Draft Litigation Briefs in Product Liability Cases.
2021
New Casetext Product Lets You Use Its Powerful Search Tool To Search Just About Anything.
Law Librarians Name Casetext Compose New Product Of The Year.
LexFusion Adds Casetext To The Collective of Companies It Represents.
2022
Legal Research Company Casetext Raises $25M In Undisclosed Funding Round.
How Neural Nets Are Liberating Legal Search from the Keyword Prison.
2023
GPT Takes the Bar Exam Again; This Time It Scores Among Top 10% of Test Takers.
On LawNext: Casetext’s Three Top Execs On CoCounsel, GPT-4 and ‘A New Age in the Practice of Law’.
