Casetext Now Automatically ‘Pushes’ Legal Research to Attorneys

By Robert Ambrogi on October 23, 2017

The legal research company Casetext has introduced a feature that monitors an attorney’s litigation dockets for briefs and memoranda from opposing counsel and then automatically delivers a report of case law that is relevant but not included in the document.

The feature uses Casetext’s legal research assistant CARA, an analytical tool that automatically finds cases that are relevant to a legal document but not cited in the document. The standard way to use CARA is for an attorney who has received a brief, memoranda or other legal document to upload it to CARA, and CARA then performs its analysis and generates a list of relevant cases that are not mentioned in the document.

With this new feature, which Casetext is calling CARA Notifications, Casetext monitors all the PACER dockets in which an attorney has active matters. Whenever opposing counsel files a substantive document such as a brief or memorandum, Casetext retrieves the document, runs it through CARA, and delivers the report to the attorney.

“Traditionally in legal research, an attorney gets a brief and then seeks out case law to oppose the brief,” Pablo Arredondo, chief legal research officer at Casetext, explained. “The closest thing there has been to push notification is that some research services let you track a case or track a search. What we’re doing now — and I believe we’re the first — is pushing the caselaw to oppose the brief automatically based on monitoring the dockets.”

Seven firms have been using this feature on a pilot basis since Oct. 1, including Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Ogletree Deakins, and Fenwick & West. The feature is being provided to them as part of their standard subscription, at no extra cost.

Casetext is analyzing the text of docket entries and documents to determine which are substantive and which are not, so that it does not run routine filings through the analysis. It only analyzes documents filed by opposing sides in the case, so the attorney’s own filings are not automatically analyzed. (Of course, subscribers can always run their documents through CARA before they file them.)

One early user called the service “anticipatory knowledge retrieval,” Arredondo said. “This is one of these early embodiments of what having an AI system can look like — software listening to the stream of a litigation record and doing what it can when an event happens.”