In The Godfather Part II, Michael Corleone famously said, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”
That line came into my head when I was briefed last week on news being announced this morning of a unique partnership between two competing legal research companies, Fastcase and ROSS Intelligence, to share content and jointly develop new products for the benefit of both companies’ customers.
The content-sharing part of this is no big surprise. In fact, Fastcase has for years licensed its cases, statutes and regulations to other legal research companies, including Casetext and Ravel Law. Way back in 2010, Fastcase CEO Ed Walters shared with me his philosophy on this — that competition in legal publishing should be based not on who owns the data, but on who provides the best features, services and prices.
“The more public you make the law,” Walters said then, “the more the competition has to be about the quality of the service, the innovativeness of the service, and the price of the service.”
With today’s announcement, Fastcase and ROSS say that ROSS has “achieved data completeness,” which sounds like legal research nirvana but means that its platform now contains the case law, statutes and regulations of all 50 U.S. states.
Co-Development of Products
But the bigger news is in what else today’s announcement says: The two companies will be working together into the future to develop additional product integrations and joint features.
“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,” Walters said in a statement. “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.”
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