Robert Ambrogi Blog
As I start to make my way through some of the news I picked up at LegalTech last week, here’s a big one: The start-up legal research site Casetext announced that it has raised a $7 million Series A financing round. The round is led by Union Square Ventures and includes participation by, among others, Thomas H. Glocer, the Yale Law School grad who is the former CEO of Thomson Reuters and, before that, Reuters Group PLC.
This investment adds to the $1.8 million in seed funding the company secured in October 2013, bringing its total funding to $8.8 million.
I’ve written about Casetext for the ABA Journal and multiple times on this blog. The site provides free access to cases and statutes for legal research and uses crowdsourcing — insights contributed by the legal community — to annotate the legal materials in its collection.
Its CEO Jake Heller is a former litigation associate at Ropes & Gray and law clerk to 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boudin. At Stanford Law School, Heller was president of the Stanford Law Review and a managing editor of the Stanford Law & Policy Review.
“We’re taking a totally different approach to legal research,” Heller said in a press release. “The old way of doing things misses the most valuable source of legal knowledge: the legal community itself. Lawyers already share insight about the law publicly to demonstrate thought leadership and grow their reputation. By building the best platform to write commentary on the law, we’re able to collaborate with the legal community to create an insightful, free legal resource for lawyers and the public.”
Last October, I wrote here about Casetext’s launch of “communities” along with several additional new features. Casetext’s community pages are designed to provide common ground for lawyers who share interests and practice areas.
If you are not familiar with Casetext, I encourage you to check it out. For more background on it, read through some of my prior posts.