Westlaw is Suing Us. Our Response:
Yesterday, Westlaw filed a suit alleging that ROSS stole its proprietary data to fast-track our technology development. These allegations are false. We did nothing wrong. Below, we release internal communications, agreements, and work product related to Westlaw’s claims. It saddens us to be writing this piece, taking away our focus from delivering useful features to our customers.
In 2017, we started work with a contractor called LegalEase to build datasets to train our artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We needed legal questions mapped directly to passages from case law that answer those questions. It was crucial that the passages mapped directly to case law in our database because we wanted to teach our system to give on-point answers directly from primary law.
In 2018, Westlaw filed a suit against LegalEase claiming that LegalEase gave us proprietary data in the form of headnotes, case summaries, and other editorial content. We never asked for or used proprietary data from Westlaw. Not only could we not map this proprietary data to the case law in our database, our technology does not attempt to generate editorialized answers; instead, it aims to recognize and extract answers directly from case law using machine learning. In fact, anyone that accesses our platform (which is freely accessible through our website) can readily see that we have no editorialized content. It has always been our view that the editorialized content approach, in addition to being fallible and difficult to quality-check, produces work that is stale the moment it is published. That is the old legal research playbook. We chose a new way.
In fact, when LegalEase did once send us unsolicited Westlaw content, we immediately told them to not include such proprietary information. You can see this in the emails provided below. The first email is from one of our engineers who discovered the data, alerting the project lead. He said, “…they [LegalEase] include a lot of what seems to be Westlaw headnotes, footnotes, and other stuff. If it’s possible for them to send us cases without that it would be much better as that is added noise…”. The second email is from our project lead to our primary contact at LegalEase about the unwanted data. We were very clear: “if you can send us cases without that extra info, that would be great. Thanks.”
As a part of its suit against LegalEase, Westlaw subpoenaed us for all communications, agreements, and work product related to the claim. Westlaw and their attorneys were unable to find any evidence that we used or benefited from Westlaw’s data. Below you can read a complete copy of the statement of work related to this matter. No matter; we had to spend over a hundred thousand dollars to comply with this subpoena. As a young company, this was a financial blow, which we are sure was not lost on Westlaw’s executive team.
Fast forward to earlier this week: we received notification that Westlaw had settled with LegalEase. We thought this costly distraction was behind us, but today we are back to square one. We opened Law.com to learn that Westlaw had filed a suit against us. That Westlaw notified the press before us is disappointing.
Since the founding of ROSS Intelligence, we have had one mission: to democratize the law through better legal technology. We recognize that for decades the legal research market has been dominated by Westlaw — with its bloated, expensive, and unintuitive products that provide bad results. We knew there was a better, and more affordable, way. Over the last five years, we have made tremendous progress. We’ve spent over a million dollars building our database of primary law from data partners such as Casemaker and Fastcase. We’ve innovated new tools and better ways of searching. We’ve signed up thousands of lawyers and law firms. And we’ve partnered with companies like Clio and Bar Associations across the United States. By filing this lawsuit despite its lack of merit, Westlaw is interfering with our chances of securing more funding or merging with other companies, which we need to do in order to innovate and compete with Westlaw. This is not the first time Westlaw has used litigation as a weapon.
We were one of the first donors to the ABA’s Center for Innovation Legal Tech for a Change program because their mission deeply resonated with ours. They believed that the intersection of law and technology affords the profession a tremendous opportunity to reshape both the delivery of and access to legal services for the 21st century. We are asking our friends and supporters in the legal community to help us fight this unfair attack and allow us to continue building products lawyers love. We believe that better legal technology can enable better access to justice at its core.
So, here we are. A small company versus a juggernaut. David versus Goliath. This litigation epitomizes everything that is wrong with Westlaw’s business practices. Having done nothing wrong, unless case law is copyrightable… Of course, it is well established that primary law is not copyrightable in the United States. As has long been held and as the Supreme Court reminded us last week, “no one can own the law” (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., №18–1150, 590 U.S. ___ (2020)). Individuals must have free access to the law if American democracy is to survive. We will continue to fight for free access to the law and look forward to showing the world Westlaw’s true colors.
If you want to get involved in this fight, email us directly at thelawisfree@rossintelligence.com.
Thank you for reading.
Andrew and Jimoh
