Casetext Close-up: Thomas Healy Bounces Ideas Off His AI Assistant

In the Casetext Close-up series, you’ll hear from practicing attorneys about how they leverage technology in running their businesses and use it to provide high-quality services to their clients.

After nearly 20 years practicing law, Thomas Healy made a shift from business law to criminal law, specifically representing indigent and juvenile defendants. These are often unusual, challenging cases. Thomas is currently representing one of 6 co-defendants who were arrested in D.C. on the day of President Trump’s inauguration, not for committing vandalism, but for conspiracy by being with a group when vandalism was being committed.

Many of Thomas’s cases, especially his appellate cases, require him to come up with unconventional arguments. Since he works alone the vast majority of the time, it can sometimes be hard to find someone he can bounce ideas off of. He’s found that CARA, Casetext’s AI-backed legal research assistant, can help.

“When I am trying to craft an argument, CARA works such that it is almost like having a conversation with a colleague. The back and forth from my text inputs to its octopus-armed outputs let me work through ideas. When you work alone, that type of ebb and flow is something that I haven’t found from any other research tool.”

Thomas describes this conversational approach to using CARA through an example of a recent case, in which he was defending a client who had repeatedly violated a banning order and repeatedly been arrested by the same police officers. As he was researching, it occurred to Thomas that maybe those officers had an obligation to look at his client’s mental competency. He wrote up a short memo of his ideas including a few citations, and uploaded that memo to CARA to see what additional cases CARA would suggest. “With the results that came back, I was able to put together an idea of how an ADA-based claim could be crafted into an argument which would focus on his constitutional rights.”

“CARA was really helpful for that,” Thomas says. “I don’t know of any other tool I could’ve used to have cobbled together such a non-linear argument that would potentially get the court of appeals to look at the rights of the mentally ill in a different way when they’re charged with crimes.”

He added, “CARA was invaluable to try to do something that was not a normal, linear argument. It’s like looking at an apple and hearing the William Tell Overture as opposed to just saying oh, that’s red. CARA gives me that ability to hear the William Tell Overture when I’m seeing something that everyone else says is just a red apple.”

You can reach Thomas Healy at healylaw@gmail.com.

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