Last Friday, I wrote here about the launch by Thomson Reuters of Quick Check, its version of a growing array of brief-analysis products that let lawyers upload a brief and discover relevant cases the brief missed. Now comes another such product, as Bloomberg Law gave a preview of its forthcoming brief analyzer during an event last night at the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting.
The legal research company Casetext introduced the first brief analysis product, CARA, in 2016. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze users’ uploaded briefs and find relevant cases the document missed. Since then, other legal research companies have developed brief-analysis products of their own, including EVA from ROSS Intelligence, Clerk from Judicata, Vincent from vLex, and then Quick Check last week.
Bloomberg is calling its product Brief Analyzer, but says the name is a placeholder for now and may change. Bloomberg will begin beta testing the product with customers in September and then schedule a release date based on the feedback from that testing. Most likely, the product will not be out until at least the first quarter of next year.
Yesterday, I was given a demonstration of a working prototype of Brief Analyzer. In its current stage of development, it is designed for a specific use case – speeding up the process through which a litigator (or litigation associate) responds to an opponent’s brief.
Brief Analyzer suggests opinions relevant to the arguments in the brief.
This differs from the products, which are designed to serve the dual purposes of both betting an opponent’s incoming brief and double-checking your own outgoing brief. Joe Breda, president of Bloomberg Law, said that the final version of Brief Analyzer will address both of these uses.
In this prototype version, a user can upload a brief in PDF format, either image-only or text-recognized. It does not take Microsoft Word documents,
