The global legal research company vLex today announced the launch of Vincent AI Document Analyze, a new tool in its suite of generative AI features that enables legal professionals to analyze litigation and transactional documents and surface legal and factual information that they can use in preparing a response. Also today, vLex said it has […]
Call me lucky. Every week, I get to sit down at the mic for my LawNext podcast and have a conversation with the leading “innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what’s next in law.”
For me, each and every one of these conversations is fun and fascinating. But I am equally fascinated to add up the numbers at the end of the year and see which topics and guests you, the listeners, found most interesting.
So, as I do every year, I’ve compiled two lists here. The first lists the top 15 episodes published during 2023. After that, I list the top 15 episodes of all time, regardless of when they were published. (The first episode of LawNext was posted on July 16, 2018.) In each case, the rankings are based on unique downloads.
Most popular this year: My interview with Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito just after their first try at having GPT take the bar exam. Interestingly, another top episode was my interview with the three founders of Casetext — before they announced their $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters.
Also popular were my dueling, back-to-back interviews with DoNotPay founder Joshua Browder Kathryn Tewson, the paralegal who investigated DoNotPay’s products; an interview on the Fastcase-vLex merger with the founders of both companies, as well as a reprise of an earlier interview with Fastcase’s founders; an interview with Clio founder Jack Newton on the lessons he’s learned over 15 years; and a 2022 year-end retrospective with LexFusion’s founders Joe Borstein and Casey Flaherty.
Rounding out the most popular this year were interviews with four legal innovation leaders recorded live at the NetDocuments conference, Axiom’s Chief Strategy and Legal Officer Catherine Kemnitz on its opening a law practice in Arizona, Smokeball’s Chief Revenue Officer Jane Oxley and President Ruchie Chadha, Theory and Principle founder Nicole Bradick, Documate founder Dorna Moini on rebranding as Gavel, BYU Law’s Gordon Smith on stepping down as dean, and AltaClaro founder Abdi Shayesteh on training lawyers to use generative AI.
You can also check out the most popular LawNext episodes of 2022, of 2021, of 2020 and of 2019.
Catch all the episodes of LawNext by subscribing at Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. For a visual array of all episodes, see the LawNext Episode Gallery.
1. Can GPT Pass the Bar Exam? We Find Out.
2. LexFusion’s Joe Borstein and Casey Flaherty on the 2022 Legal Market in Review.
3. Casetext’s Three Top Execs On CoCounsel, GPT-4 and ‘A New Age in the Practice of Law’.
4. Paralegal Kathryn Tewson On Her Quest for Accountability from DoNotPay.
5. A Special Fireside Chat on the State of the Legal Industry, Recorded Live with Four Innovation Leaders.
6. ‘A Bit Of A Nothingburger’: Joshua Browder Speaks To The DoNotPay Controversy.
7. As ALSP Axiom Opens A Law Firm in Arizona, Its Chief Strategy and Legal Officer Catherine Kemnitz Shares Details.
9. Theory and Principle Founder Nicole Bradick on Designing and Building Legal Tech Products.
10. Documate Founder Dorna Moini on Rebranding As Gavel and How Law Firms Can Productize their Legal Services.
11. 15 Years, 15 Lessons: Clio Founder Jack Newton On What He’s Learned About Building a Successful Company.
12. Revisiting the Fastcase Origin Story: Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal on How Their Company Came To Be.
13. The Four Founders of vLex and Fastcase on the Merger Of Their Two Companies.
14. As He Steps Down As Dean, Gordon Smith Reflects On His Mission To Make BYU Law ‘One Of The Most Innovative Law Schools in the Country’.
15. Training Lawyers to Use Generative AI, with AltaClaro Founder Abdi Shayesteh.
1. As Time By Ping Raises $36.5M, Exclusive Interview with CEO Ryan Alshak.
2. Jonathan Pyle on Why He Developed Docassemble and Made It Open Source.
3. Joshua Schwadron On Pivoting His Legal Tech Company to A Law Firm to Compete with His Former Customers.
4. How to Start Your Own Law Firm and Have the Practice You Always Wanted, with Carolyn Elefant.
5. The State of the E-Discovery Industry, with Doug Austin.
6. How Legal Departments Can Use Data to Drive Smarter Decision-Making, with Jeffrey Solomon of Wolters Kluwer.
8. As LawPay Acquires MyCase, Our Exclusive LawNext Interview with the Two CEOs.
9. Pro Bono Net Cofounder Mark O’Brien on Technology As A ‘Force Multiplier’ For Meeting Legal Needs.
10. From Radical to Trailblazer: How Innovative GC Jeffrey Carr Disrupted the Legal Department, Part 1.
11. Kriti Sharma, Chief Product Officer for Legal Tech at Thomson Reuters.
12. Former Tesla Lawyer Laura Frederick on How to Teach Contracting Skills for the Real World.
13. Digitory Legal Founder Catherine Krow on Using Billing Data to Drive Diversity.
14. Filevine CEO Ryan Anderson on His Company’s $108M Raise and the Future of Practice Management.
15. Carl Malamud on His Three-Plus Decades of Working to Free the Law.
Look over this list of my blog posts that were most popular this year, and there is no doubt about the topic that most captivated the legal industry. Of my 40 most-read posts of 2023, 30 directly involved generative AI and others implicated it.
Of course, there is a chicken-or-egg aspect to this. Were so many of my most-read stories about AI because that was what most interested my readers, or was it simply because I wrote so much this year about the topic?
Seven of the most popular stories related to Casetext’s launch of its generative AI product CoCounsel last March, its subsequent acquisition by Thomson Reuters in June, and Thomson Reuters’ subsequent roll-out of generative AI in Westlaw.
Similarly, five of the top stories involved LexisNexis’s launch of its generative AI product, Lexis+ AI, starting with its initial release in May to its release for general availability in October.
Four stories about the generative AI legal startup Harvey made my top-stories list, starting from its initial fundraise last November to its firmwide deployment within Allen & Overy in February to its Series A raise in April to a quirky story about a second legal AI startup also called Harvey.
Two popular stories were about GPT taking the bar exam: one in March when GPT passed the bar exam, and the second in November when it passed the legal ethics exam.
My most popular story of all this year, by a long measure, was about the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal’s proposed rule on appellants’ use of AI to create filings. I do not know why that was so popular, but its views far exceeded any other of my posts this year. A related story on the most popular list was about the sanctions imposed on lawyers in New York who cited “bogus” cases in their brief.
Representative of the interest in generative AI this year were the two stories that made my list about the law firm Gunderson Dettmer’s development of its own “homegrown” generative AI, ChatGD. The original story I wrote in August about ChatGD’s launch was my 12th most-read story, while a followup I published just last week quickly rose to be the 13th most read.
Among other popular stories on my blog this year:
But I go back to where I started. The dominant story in legal technology this year was generative AI — not so much for what it is already doing in legal, but more for what it might do down the road.
Here’s the list of my 40 most-read posts.
1. In First for A U.S. Appeals Court, 5th U.S. Circuit Court Considers Rule Requiring Lawyers to Certify they Did Not Rely on AI to Create Filings (Nov. 29, 2023).
2. Harvey AI Raises $21M In A Series A Round Led By Sequoia (April 26, 2023).
3. New GPT-Based Chat App from LawDroid Is A Lawyer’s ‘Copilot’ for Research, Drafting, Brainstorming and More (Jan. 25, 2023).
4. LexisNexis Enters the Generative AI Fray with Limited Release of New Lexis+ AI, Using GPT and other LLMs (May 4, 2023).
5. Law Students Are Reluctant To Use ChatGPT, Survey Finds. The Question Is, Why? (June 7, 2023).
6. As Allen & Overy Deploys GPT-based Legal App Harvey Firmwide, Founders Say Other Firms Will Soon Follow (Feb. 17, 2023).
7. I Am Deeply Saddened To Report The Death Of Monica Bay: Friend, Mentor and Role Model to So Many in Legal Tech (Oct. 29, 2023).
8. Thomson Reuters Previews Its Plans for Generative AI, Announces Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot (May 23, 2023).
9. In Major Legal Tech Deal, vLex and Fastcase Merge, Creating A Global Legal Research Company, Backed By Oakley Capital and Bain Capital (April 4, 2023).
10. Casetext Launches Co-Counsel, Its OpenAI-Based ‘Legal Assistant’ To Help Lawyers Search Data, Review Documents, Draft Memos, Analyze Contracts and More (March 1, 2023).
11. Ironclad’s AI Contract Redlining Tool ‘AI Assist’ Comes Out Of Beta, New Using GPT-4 (April 11, 2023).
12. Gunderson Dettmer Launches ChatGD; First U.S.-Based Firm To Develop Proprietary Internal Generative AI App (Aug. 9, 2023).
13. Four Months After Launching Its ‘Homegrown’ GenAI Tool, Law Firm Gunderson Dettmer Reports On Results So Far, New Features, And A Surprise on Cost (Dec. 20, 2023).
14. In Case of ‘Real Lawyers Against A Robot Lawyer,’ Federal Court Dismisses Law Firm’s Suit Against DoNotPay for Unauthorized Law Practice (Nov. 21, 2023).
15. As Thomson Reuters Explains Its Acquisition of Casetext, Some Investors Seem Uncertain (June 27, 2023).
16. LexisNexis Rolls Out Lexis+ AI for General Availability, Promising Hallucination-Free Answers to Legal Questions (Oct. 25, 2023).
17. The Rumors Were True: Thomson Reuters Acquires Casetext for $650M Cash (June 26, 2023).
18. An Interview with Casetext CEO Jake Heller on His Company’s Acquisition By Thomson Reuters (June 28, 2023).
19. GPT Takes the Bar Exam Again; This Time It Scores Among Top 10% of Test Takers (March 14, 2023).
20. Survey Released Today Finds That 40% Of Legal Professionals Use Or Plan To Use Generative AI (Aug. 21, 2023).
21. Contracts Company Ironclad Taps Into GPT-3 For Instant Document Redlining Based On A Company’s Playbook (Feb. 1, 2023).
22. Major Thomson Reuters News: Westlaw Gets Generative AI Research Plus Integration with Casetext CoCounsel; Gen AI Coming Soon to Practical Law (Nov. 15, 2023).
23. Thomson Reuters Spins Off Elite As Independent Company Now Owned By Asset Manager TPG (April 4, 2023).
24. In A $1B E-Discovery Acquisition Double-Play, Reveal Acquires Both Logikcull and IPRO (Aug. 29, 2023).
25. DISCO Cofounder Kiwi Camara Steps Down As CEO; Board Member Scott Hill Is Named Interim Leader (Sept. 11, 2023).
26. Breaking: LexisNexis Announces Preview Launch of Lexis Connect, AI-Powered Matter Management within Microsoft Teams (May 11, 2023).
27. 12 Thoughts on Promises and Challenges of AI in Legal after Yesterday’s AI Summit at Harvard Law School (Sept. 20, 2023).
28. The Strange Case of the Two Legal AI Companies Named Harvey, and their Coincidental Connection to Winston (March 28, 2023).
29. Court Imposes Sanctions On Lawyers Who Filed Bogus Cases After Relying On ChatGPT For Legal Research (June 22, 2023).
30. Bessemer Venture Partners Acquires Majority Stake in Legal Practice Management Company Litify (Feb. 9, 2023).
31. Generative AI, Having Already Passed the Bar Exam, Now Passes the Legal Ethics Exam (Nov. 16, 2023).
32. There’s A New Top-Level Domain for Lawyers: ‘.esq’ (May 9, 2023).
33. Clio Goes All Out with Major Product Announcements, Including A Personal Injury Add-On, E-Filing, and (Of Course) Generative AI (Oct. 9, 2023).
34. Stealth Legal AI Startup Harvey Raises $5M in Round Led By OpenAI (Nov. 23, 2022).
35. Citing ‘Political Challenges,’ ABA Innovation Center Cancels Op-Ed Advocating Regulatory Reform; In An Exclusive, We Have the Piece They Wouldn’t Publish (Aug. 3, 2023).
36. LexisNexis Lays Out More Details On Its Collaboration with Microsoft to Roll Out Generative AI Products (Aug. 2, 2023).
37. LexisNexis Unveils Two New Generative AI Products (Nov. 14, 2023).
38. The Good and the Bad of Solo Practice, Per Clio’s Latest Legal Trends Report for Solos (April 18, 2023).
39. Thomson Reuters Teases Generative AI Updates to Westlaw Precision Coming Nov. 15 (Nov. 1, 2023).
40. Zuva Launches Free AI-Powered Contracts Review Tool (March 9, 2023).
Michael Sander, the founder of Docket Alarm, a product that mines federal and state court dockets to provide litigation alerts and case analytics, has left the company, seven months after its acquisition by legal research company vLex in April.
Docket Alarm was part of legal research company Fastcase, which had acquired it in January 2018, and it was included in the April merger of Fastcase and vLex.
In a Nov. 22 email to vLex staff, Sander said he is taking “a short breather” and plans to “re-emerge within the industry continuing to innovate with strong ties to all the folks here at vLex under the same mission.”
Sander told me that he will continue collaborating with the vLex team and advising on the future of Docket Alarm, but that he is ready for a new career challenge. He said he has plans — as yet undisclosed — to launch a new venture.
“I am ready for the next stage of my entrepreneurial journey, which started independently, then acquired by Fastcase, and now with vLex,” he said. “I’ve had frank conversations with so many legal professionals: judges, arbitrators, attorneys, librarians, paralegals, and those serving them — there are so many pain-points in legal, where simple tech is well poised to help.”
Daniel Ivtsan
vLex has named Daniel Ivtsan as the new head of product for Docket Alarm. Ivtsan will join vLex from court data and analytics company UniCourt, where he has been VP of product since July 2022. Previously, he was chief product officer at legal analytics company Gavelytics, which shut down in June 2022.
Sander was still working as an intellectual property associate in New York when he founded Docket Alarm in 2012. He initially focused on federal court dockets, but then began expanding to cover state court dockets as well.
In those beginning years, he built up the company and the product virtually single-handedly, directly building more than 60 of the data connectors Docket Alarm still uses today, he told me.
After his company’s 2018 acquisition by Fastcase, Sander held the position of vice president of analytics.
Last January, Docket Alarm was one of the first products to incorporate the GPT-3 generative AI technology, using it to allow legal professionals to see summaries of court filings without having to open the filing.
At the time of the vLex-Fastcase merger, Docket Alarm’s integration of generative AI was touted as key to the merged company’s future development of tools using large language models.
In an email Sander sent to vLex staff on Nov. 22, he said that it was his last day at the company. Here is his entire email:
“My last day running Docket Alarm will be today. It’s been more than a decade since founding Docket Alarm, we’ve transformed it into a litigation platform used daily by thousands of attorneys across biglaw and small firms alike. Leaving brings a mix of emotions, pride among them.
“Docket Alarm has innovated in three key areas: content, analysis, and workflow. For content, our team of experts now collect more records than anyone, over 350,000 U.S. legal dockets and documents daily, with analysis tied deeply into attorney workflows.
“And … sales. Over the years, we’ve collected much of the AMLaw (and me, over 2 dozen firm mugs), but I was at the dinner table with my Mom when I got an email confirming Docket Alarm’s first major law firm client. In 2019, Fastcase secured its first major enterprise deal and we knew we had a winning repeatable model. In 2021, we launched our most successful ILTA and closed so many, with Damien amplifying our patent-pending pleading tags, and setting industry standards. When our biggest firm hit 1000 users, Docket Alarm was a sure bet.
“I entrusted Docket Alarm to Luis, Ed, Phil, and Angel’s leadership, and with Oakley’s backing, the company has a bright future.
“So what’s next? Today is the last day, but I will remain available, scope tbd. I expect to take a short breather, and re-emerge within the industry continuing to innovate with strong ties to all the folks here at vLex under the same mission, spreading access to truth, improving dispute resolution, and promoting justice.”
Sander told me that he is extremely proud of what he built with Docket Alarm.
“Today, Docket Alarm’s scale is unmatched, and has innovated in key areas such as court records retrieval, legal text analysis and analytics, and workflow ease-of-use,” he said. “Thousands of attorneys use it every day. So, yup, I’m proud of it, and excited that vLex wants to invest deeply in the platform.”
Although Sander is not yet revealing what he will do next, he offered a preview.
“While I am not yet ready to announce my new banner, two developments excite me particularly: AI and standardization. I was early in incorporating GPT-4 into a litigation workflow platform and am directly involved building cross-industry SALI standards. These developments are creating a perfect storm of innovation opportunity in legal tech.”
Ed Walters, chief strategy officer at vLex and cofounder and former CEO of Fastcase, said that Sander’s departure is “a very friendly parting of the ways and that the vLex team is proud of everything he accomplished with Docket Alarm.
“He is a very unique entrepreneur who built the leading docket analytics tool,” Walters said. “I’ve know a lot of legal tech entrepreneurs and he’s as good as any of them.”
Walters said that vLex will be doubling down over the next year on its investment in Docket Alarm to even more rapidly scale the product and its content and to globalize it.
Walters said Ivtsan will play a key role in leading this next phase of development. “He’s a veteran in the industry, and he will bring a really interesting breadth of experience to the team.”
The e-discovery company DISCO said today it has entered into a long-term license with the international legal research company vLex to obtain access to its U.S. primary law library of cases, statutes, regulations, court rules and constitutions.
The company said it will incorporate the legal research data into its core platform to create a marriage of factual development and legal analysis, allowing litigators to analyze fact patterns against the relevant law.
“We envision a seamless integrated user experience, between fact development and legal analysis where litigators can quickly identify relevant legal precedents with similar fact patterns or analyze patterns based on relevant law,” said Katie DeBord, DISCO’s vice president of product strategy.
“It will allow lawyers to dynamically organize the facts of their case and applicable law based on what needs to be proven and disproven, and strategically interface with technology in a way that augments their prosecution of matters from start to finish.”
DISCO said it sees numerous opportunities for its customers that can come from adding this legal research data to its platform, include creating risk assessments that analyze facts against the relevant law, finding similar fact patterns, using AI to answer complex questions about the law, and identifying case law relevant to the causes of action without needing to use multiple products.
“This is an important milestone in the execution of our long-term strategic vision and brings DISCO one step closer towards a truly end-to-end technology platform that effectively handles the most important aspects of complex litigation work,” DeBord said.
Earlier this year, vLex acquired Fastcase and its collection of U.S. legal research materials.
When the legal research companies vLex and Fastcase announced their merger in April, they promised the deal would fuel new opportunities for the development of generative AI for legal research. By creating the world’s largest global legal research library, spanning more than 1 billion documents from more than 110 countries, they said, they would have the legal industry’s ultimate large language model.
“This is the biggest legal data corpus ever assembled, including highly valuable structured data with industry-standard tags and analytics,” Fastcase cofounder Ed Walters said at the time. “The combined library is the crown jewel of LLMs and the ultimate training data set for legal AI.”
Today, vLex is beginning to deliver on that promise, unveiling the beta version of a generative AI legal research platform, built on an upgraded version of vLex’s Vincent AI, an AI legal research assistant that vLex originally launched in 2018, that extends the power of generative AI across jurisdictions and languages.
vLex says that the new Vincent AI is a significant step forward for AI-powered legal analysis because it is based on one of the world’s largest online law libraries of cases, statutes, regulations, dockets, pleadings and motions, as well as secondary materials and expert treatises.
With today’s beta launch, Vincent AI works for legal research in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, and Spain, in both English and Spanish. vLex will continue to add more jurisdictions and languages on a rolling basis.
Yesterday, I was given a preview of Vincent AI by Walters, who is now chief strategy officer at vLex, and Damien Riehl, vice president, solutions champion, at vLex.
Vincent AI is launching with four ways of conducting research (or “skills” in AI parlance):
When you ask a question in Vincent, it gives a fairly detailed response in the form of a memorandum, which starts with a quick, one-paragraph summary followed by more-detailed discussion of the applicable cases, legislation and other sources. Each memo even includes a section discussing implications and legal caveats — unlike some AI tools that only aim to please.
All the while, in the right panel of the screen, it shows links to the actual authorities. For each linked resource, it shows a summary of the case or other document, and a one-paragraph excerpt that most directly relates to your question. In addition, it provides a percentage ranking of how well the resource answered the question. Vincent only shows resources that rank above 70%.
At any point, the user can choose to eliminate any authority from the right pane simply by unchecking a box and Vincent will rerun its analysis without that authority. In a planned future update, users will be able to add their own authorities into the mix, if they know of a particular on-point authority that Vincent did not include.
In this way, Vincent is providing the user with the transparency to directly check the authorities it relied on and be assured that it did not hallucinate any of the resources. “The name of the game is trust but verify,” Riehl said. “We’re the only ones in the industry that make trust but verify super easy.”
Moreover, because Vincent is using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to base its analysis solely on resources within the vLex database it is virtually incapable of hallucinating. When a user asks a question, Vincent converts it to a vector search to search the vLex database, and then it bases its generative AI analysis only on the resources retrieved from that search.
“It is converting that into a kind of a natural language search and searching over the jurisdiction that we asked and then coming up with results,” Walters said. “The answers can only come from this list of results, which solves the hallucination problem.”
This also addresses the “black box” issue with certain generative AI products, where it is impossible to know how the AI arrived at a certain answer, Walters said. “I like to think of ours as ‘glass box’ AI because you get to look in and have some control over it.”
In addition to these four legal research skills, Vincent AI already includes other AI-driven features. Among them, it can:
On top of all that, this release of Vincent includes Cert, the citator that Fastcase has been developing since its acquisition in 2020 of Judicata, which developed the original version of Cert. Now in Vincent AI, cases will be marked with negative-treatment tags such as “distinguished” or “overruled.” However, Cert is only active for certain states so far, with others still to be added.
Although the Vincent AI tools are currently available only to select users and only in vLex, a new version of the Fastcase platform will be rolled out next year and will include Vincent AI.
Vincent is being released today in beta to select law firms. Other law firms wishing to join the beta can request to be added to the waitlist at: www.vlex.com/insights.
In a press release announcing the new Vincent AI, vLex CEO Lluís Faus said that it is a major improvement over other legal LLMs on the market. “It is as big as the jump from ChatGPT to GPT-4. The results are astonishing.”
I have not had the opportunity to be hands-on with Vincent AI, but I have now had two separate demonstrations of it, and both times, it was impressive for its ability to coalesce the law in response to a query and to formulate arguments on points of law. The memos it generated appeared to be almost ready to use as is — although it is always advisable for a lawyer to review anything AI generates before passing it on.
Two of the biggest concerns about AI in legal are hallucinations and lack of transparency into the black box. Vincent AI addresses both of those concerns by drawing its answers only from vLex data and showing the user the exact resources it is relying on and its level of confidence in their relevance.
While Vincent so far works only for research in the U.K., U.S., Ireland and Spain, the promise of a multi-lingual AI research platform is intriguing. To be able to compare the laws of multiple countries, regardless of the languages in which those laws are written, could be powerful for legal professionals with cross-border practices.
I was particularly impressed with Vincent’s ability to generate arguments for or against a proposition. I imagined myself on a call with a client or an opposing counsel, having to come up in the spur of the moment with plausible arguments on something being discussed, and turning to Vincent for a quick assist. (I should note that the argument generator currently takes as long as five minutes, but Walters said that will get faster.)
So the bottom line for me is that Vincent appears to be as close as I have seen in delivering on the promise of generative AI for legal research. I say that with the proviso that I have not recently tested what may be its two main competitors, Casetext CoCounsel and Harvey, but neither of those have all four of Vincent’s skills or the ability to answer questions across multiple nations and languages.
Since 2011, Fastcase has released an annual list of the Fastcase 50, honoring 50 of the law’s “smartest, most courageous, innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders.” Fortunately, even though Fastcase merged earlier this year with vLex, that tradition continues, as Fastcase has now announced the 2023 honorees.
I say “fortunately” because, as I wrote when last year’s list was announced, the Fastcase 50 is probably the best-available roster of those who are leading the charge on innovation in law.
Over the years, the list has included a diverse selection of lawyers, legal technologists, policymakers, judges, law librarians, bar association executives, and people from all walks of life who are innovating in the legal profession. (I was honored to be in the inaugural Fastcase 50 class in 2011.
“This has been an amazing year of change for legal tech, including at vLex and Fastcase,” said Ed Walters, Fastcase co-founder and the Chief Strategy Officer of vLex. “This year’s list of honorees reflects a year of transformation for legal services. The Fastcase 50 class of 2023 is also the most international group of honorees in our history, which reflects the growing scale of vLex and Fastcase.”
The Fastcase 50 honorees for 2023 are:
Congratulations to all!
It was major news April 4 when the legal research and technology companies Fastcase and vLex announced their merger, creating a single entity that they say now has the world’s largest subscriber base of lawyers and law firms and a legal research library of more than 1 billion documents from more than 100 countries.
It is a deal that could reshape the legal tech landscape on a global basis and potentially even threaten the longstanding legal research duopoly of Westlaw and LexisNexis. So what does it mean for the companies? What does it mean for their customers? And what does it mean for the legal market more broadly?
To explore these questions and more, LawNext host Bob Ambrogi is joined by the four founders of the two companies:
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With the news last week of the merger of legal research companies Fastcase and vLex, it seemed a good time to revisit our 2019 interview with the founders of Fastcase, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal. The occasion of this interview was the company’s 20th anniversary, and we recorded it live, on the exhibit hall floor, at the annual conference of the American Association of Law Libraries.
In this interview, Walters and Rosenthal recount how, as two young associates at the law firm Covington & Burling, they came to found Fastcase in 1999. They also recall some of their greatest successes and worst mistakes over the years as founders, and offer their predictions for the future of Fastcase. How do their predictions in 2019 stand up in 2023? Well, you’ll have to listen to find out the answer to that.
Although Fastcase started as a legal research company, in recent years, it had diversified and expanded into areas such as legal analytics, legal publishing, legal news, and even legal document automation. That diversification had already started when we spoke to Walters and Rosenthal in 2019. The year before, they had acquired the legal dockets and analytics company Docket Alarm, and, as you will hear, they were already seeing analytics as a key component of their future growth.
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In a deal that will reshape the legal research and legal technology landscape on a global basis and threaten the longstanding “Wexis” legal research duopoly, the companies vLex and Fastcase today announced that they have merged into a single entity that they say will have the world’s largest subscriber base of lawyers and law firms and a legal research library of more than 1 billion documents from more than 100 countries.
As part of the merger, Oakley Capital, a major European private equity investor, which last September acquired majority ownership of vLex, and Bain Capital Credit, a global credit specialist with some $42 billion in assets under management, are investing an undisclosed amount in the combined business to expand its global reach and accelerate its development of artificial intelligence tools for the legal market.
Lluís Faus will become global CEO.
The combined entity will be called vLex Group and will be led by Lluís Faus as global CEO. Faus was cofounder of vLex in Barcelona in 2000 and had been its CEO ever since. It will maintain headquarters in Washington, D.C., Miami and Barcelona.
The two founders of Fastcase, CEO Ed Walters and President Phil Rosenthal, who started their company in 1999, will remain with the company in global executive roles and take seats on the merged company’s board, together with Faus and his cofounder and brother Angel Faus, who is CTO of vLex.
vLex has been unique among legal research services for its breadth of international coverage. It provides access to comprehensive primary and secondary law collections from more than 100 countries.
The company told me last year that its collection of case law, legislation, journals and dockets serves over 2 million users across Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean, and the Americas.
Its platform includes Vincent, an AI-powered legal research assistant that analyzes legal documents that users upload and finds relevant search results. It works in both English and Spanish.
In 2019, vLex acquired Justis Publishing Ltd., a 33-year-old UK legal publisher with clients in more than 40 countries including the UK, Ireland, the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.
Historically, vLex has not had as strong a foothold in the United States, but in recent years, it has been driving to expand its growth here, particularly since its acquisition by Oakley last September. Just last week, vLex had announced a partnership with the American Bar Association to offer access to materials from the ABA’s Antitrust Law Section.
For U.S. primary legal research materials, vLex originally partnered with the legal research service Casemaker to obtain U.S. case law and other materials. After Fastcase acquired Casemaker in 2021, vLex partnered with Fastcase for U.S. primary law.
As for Fastcase, it claims to have a subscriber base in the U.S. of more than 1 million lawyers, or more than three-quarters of all lawyers in the United States. In significant part, it has built this subscriber base through its partnerships with state and local bar associations as a preferred member benefit.
Originally a legal research company, Fastcase has diversified in recent years, launching its Full Court Press publishing arm and acquiring Docket Alarm and Law Street Media in 2018, NextChapter in 2019, and the technology and team of Judicata in 2020.
Other than a seed round from family and friends and one outside investor not long after it was founded in 1999, Fastcase has never taken outside investment and has bootstrapped its growth through revenues.
“Bringing these two highly successful businesses together will help democratize the law for legal professionals worldwide through a dynamic and robust platform that improves legal research accuracy, efficiency, and affordability,” Lluís Faus said in a statement provided by the company.
In an interview last yesterday, Fastcase CEO Ed Walters called this the most consequential merger in the history of legal technology.
“Legal research is the most used and most important legal tech that exists,” Walters said. “That market has been dominated worldwide by two companies for as long as anyone can remember. This is the beginning of the end of the duopoly in legal research.”
Fastcase founders Rosenthal and Walters in 2019.
From Fastcase’s earliest days, Walters and Rosenthal have said that the company’s mission was to democratize the law through affordable pricing and smarter technology.
That has also been the mission of vLex, Walters told me. “Now, our mission to democratize the law is no longer constrained by the geographic boundaries of the U.S.”
He described this deal as a merger of equals, of two companies that were founded within a year of each other, that have been pushing towards the same goal, and that now have a shared goal of building a truly global law library.
“The vision here is to have a global law library with all of the world’s law online and accessible to everybody, and translatable from every language to every language,” Walters said. “I don’t think there is another company that could execute on this vision.”
He said that both he and cofounder Rosenthal will remain with the company and in fact are reinvesting in the combined company.
“What excited me is, with strong financial backers like Oakley and Bain, what we could do with that. Take two disciplined companies that are a good fit for each other, and a shared strategic vision, and the backing of two of the best funds in the world, and the sky’s the limit.”
Walters said that the two companies’ products will retain their branding, with vLex as the primary brand outside the U.S. and Fastcase, Docket Alarm and NextChapter continuing within the U.S.
Both companies’ management teams are remaining, but the details of the organizational chart are still being worked out, he said.
At a time when so much of the legal industry is focused on the potential applications of large language models, this merger will create the largest data training set in the legal market, Walters said, leading to new opportunities for development of generative AI.
“With the merger of vLex and Fastcase, nobody has a more extensive global law library than we do,” Walters said. “This is the biggest legal data corpus ever assembled, including highly valuable structured data with industry-standard tags and analytics. The combined library is the crown jewel of LLMs and the ultimate training data set for legal AI.”
Neither company is new to AI, he pointed out. vLex developed one of the first AI assistants for legal research, called Vincent, and it has long used an internal AI tool, Iceberg, to structure the data it collects from courts and other sources.
Fastcase’s Docket Alarm was one of the first legal tech companies to integrate OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, and both Fastcase and Docket Alarm use AI to create structure and tags in legal documents.
The companies said that they will use their combined financial strength to accelerate growth and to invest more in the frontiers of artificial intelligence in law.
The merger could also help accelerate global adoption of a common set of data standards for classifying legal work. The SALI Alliance – short for Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry – recently released version 2.0 of its Legal Matter Standard Specification, which sets out an ontology of some 10,000 tags.
A principal developer of the SALI standards is Damien Riehl, who works at Fastcase as vice president for litigation workflow and analytics content.
In our conversation yesterday, Fastcase said that extending the SALI taxonomy to the combined vLex global library could be extremely powerful for legal research, enabling highly specific searches across laws around the world and in any language.
Walters said that the merger will not impact Fastcase’s partnerships with bar associations, except perhaps to extend the legal research materials available to their members. “Our plan is to continue being the best bar partner there is,” he said. “This doesn’t change anything.”
The merger also will have no impact on any of the products’ subscription models, Walters said.
Walters said Fastcase and vLex had wanted to do this deal for several years and had been working on closing it since last fall. Although the dollar value of the deal is not being disclosed, Walters said, “It’s enough for us to pursue the vision for a global law library at scale.”
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