• 2013
  • Founded
  • Operated under a crowdsourcing model
• 2016
  • CARA AI released, used as a tool to analyze briefs
• 2023
  • Co-Counsel released, uses GPT-4
  • Acquired by Thomson Reuters

Casetext was founded in 2013 by Jake Heller, Laura Safdie, and Pablo Arredondo. Since then, it has gone through 7 rounds of funding, the last one on Jan 7, 2022.

Heller observed that there were many industries in which technology made things simpler, and wanted to bring that to legal firms.

We knew that the technology to do relatively trivial stuff like find nearby restaurants or good reviews of them or what have you was there. And it just felt like this big disconnect where things that really mattered at the end of the day, like whether or not somebody spends their life in prison — technology wasn't really helping there.

— Jake Heller, in his interview with Y Combinator President Garry Tan

Casetext started out as a crowdsourced solution for legal questions, similar to Wikipedia or Stack Overflow. Lawyers and paralegals could go over the same documents, make annotations, and up- or down-vote and reply to those annotations.

In 2016, Casetext launched CARA AI. Users could upload case files to CARA to perform advanced searches on the uploaded text, powered by a rudimentary AI.

In 2023, Casetext leveraged OpenAI's GPT-4 to launch CoCounsel, a much more powerful tool that will allow users to summarize and extract data from legal documents, answer questions about contract compliance, and prepare for depositions, among other tasks. This allowed lawyers to do in 10-15 minutes what would once have taken several days.

Casetext has put up "guardrails" around these tasks to ensure the reliability and quality of CoCounsel's responses. These safeguards can be manually disabled by users to interact with CoCounsel in a more conversational manner like how Chat GPT is used, with the understanding that it may result in less accurate responses.

Since inception, Casetext's 10,000+ customers have submitted over 14 million queries. Their clients include Fisher Phillips, LLP, Washington Legal, LLP, and The California Innocence Project.

The company was recently acquired by Thomson Reuters in August 2023, for $650M.

Harvey is another company that aims to offer AI-based legal services. Harvey also uses Open AI's tools, but the company seems to be in the early stages and not yet ready to take on new clients.

The guardrails built into Casetext's CoCounsel tool is an invaluable feature that boosts users' confidence in the quality of the results.

Building on top of this reliablity, Casetext could launch an inter-state legal guide tool. Since traffic laws differ from state to state, an individual could use this to educate themselves on the differences in traffic laws between their home state and their destination state. If they happen to be driving, this could also outline the different laws to take note of when passing through each of the states on their travel route.

Since legislation always lags behind technological advancements, such a tool could also incorporate any court rulings around any new transportation methods, such as the electronic scooter when it first came out.

This expands their user base from law firms to the general public. While this new tool might need to be free to encourage adoption, the data gathered from its use may drive improvements in both itself and CoCounsel, ultimately improving the value of services they provide to the legal industry.

• Casetext
• Y Combinator
• Crunchbase
• LAW.COM
• LawSites
• Harvey