Casetext Turns 5: How We Started our Mission to Change Legal Research Forever

Five years ago, a few of us started Casetext in my living room apartment. We worked on fold-out tables, ate cheap takeout daily, worked grueling hours, and, for almost a year, one of our co-founders, Pablo, spent three nights a week commuting from Los Angeles and sleeping in my Sunnyvale guest bedroom (my wife is a saint). I didn’t take a salary for over a year. With so few people at the company, everyone did every job — coding, fundraising, hiring, managing, planning, and janitorial. Whatever it took.

What compelled us — all co-founders who had successful legal careers, great (and expensive) educations — to do something as crazy as starting a startup? Reflecting back over the last five years, despite all that has changed over that time, we are still driven by the same fundamental beliefs and towards the same objective. Only now, we get to do it with fifteen times the workforce, I get to pay myself a salary, and we have real offices across the country.

The fundamental beliefs we started Casetext with include:

• Lawyers pursue justice and zealously defend their clients, and deserve the best, most cutting-edge technology to further that pursuit.
• Legal technology should be as easy-to-use and well-designed as the technology lawyers use every day outside of work.
• Legal information need not be so expensive that it leaves out large swathes of the profession and the public; indeed, much of it can be made free.
• We can deliver a high-class legal information product at an affordable price by accomplishing much of what legacy providers do with tens of thousands of employees by instead working with a handful of world-class data scientists, engineers, lawyers, and a dedicated community.
• Every aspect of working with us, from support to pricing and purchasing, should be transparent, simple, and, as much as possible, online rather than opaque, complex, and burdensome.

A lot has changed over these last five years. For example, building CARA A.I., an advanced, artificial intelligence research system that effortlessly helps attorneys find the best cases and authorities in seconds, would have been extraordinarily difficult if not impossible when the company started five years ago. We’re also a very different company — we now work with hundreds of firms, from the Am Law 200 to solo firms and everything in between. More than 250,000 people research on the site every month.

But our beliefs and principles have not changed. I look forward to the next five years of making cutting-edge and well-designed technology available to attorneys and the public at an affordable price, with a simple, transparent, and easy-to-work platform.