Once upon a time, in a magical city called San Francisco, three former lawyers came together to develop an innovative legal research platform, as an alternative to traditional legal research services such as Thomson Reuters Westlaw and LexisNexis. They called their new company Casetext.
Their original idea was to create a free, comprehensive library of primary legal research materials, supplemented by crowdsourced annotations and edits contributed by users, like a Wikipedia for law.
But as artificial intelligence technology evolved, the founders shifted their focus to exploring how AI could be used to advance legal research and other legal tasks.
By the time Casetext reached its 10th anniversary in 2023, it had fully embraced AI, launching one of the first and most talked about generative AI legal assistants, CoCounsel.
So successful was Casetext with its CoCounsel product that Westlaw — the company to which it once sought to provide an alternative — bought it for a whopping $650 million in cash.
With their acquisition complete, the three founders and their AI legal assistant lived happily ever after.
Illustrations and spelling errors by ChatGPT’s Coloring Book Hero, from OpenAI.
Post script: I asked ChatGPT to make the characters more diverse. It responded: “Creating illustrations with more visibly diverse characters is a great idea, especially for a coloring book intended for children. For the next illustration, I’ll ensure that the characters are more distinctly diverse in their appearance.” It did not do that, even after I tried asking a second time. Of course, the entire rainbow of colors is yours to use when coloring in these illustrations.
