It’s Time to Upgrade the Legal Research Experience

Legal research can be one of the most tedious, anxiety-inducing tasks in legal practice. We all know the feeling of trying to navigate a slow, cluttered platform at 2 a.m., hoping to assure yourself that you haven’t missed a case. And after hours of running searches, poring over the results, adding a word to your boolean search, and repeating again and again, it’s still more likely than you think that you missed something important. How frustrating!

Our CARA A.I. technology, which has been available for the last year and a half, took the first major step toward a solution: a legal research tool built to introduce efficiency into the legal research process, and ensure that attorneys see the best, most relevant cases as quickly as possible. It’s made a huge difference for a number of our customers. We’ve heard from attorneys at even the most elite firms who nearly missed a case until they ran their brief through CARA, or who decided to re-write an argument after finding some unexpected case law that wasn’t surfaced by any other research platform.

Today, we’re taking that progress a huge step further. Casetext has released a new version of our legal research platform, which seamlessly integrates CARA A.I. contextual search with traditional legal search functionality, making legal research faster and more efficient than ever before, while also providing highly relevant results that no other platform would find.

By integrating CARA A.I. with legal search functionality, we’re empowering attorneys to research the same way they always have, but get much more relevant results, much more quickly. The process is largely the same as what you’re used to: you type in a keyword, and see a list of results that you can sort and filter by jurisdiction, cite count, etc. The basic interface is similar to what you’re used to seeing too (but much cleaner and simpler).

A single step makes all the difference: drag and drop a document. When you do that, CARA A.I. tailors the search experience to what you’re working on — the factual background, legal issues, jurisdiction, and motion at issue — so that you get relevant authorities fast. This takes out a lot of the frustration, difficulty, and risk involved with traditional Boolean legal research.

Even better, as of today, you can use any legal document to start a search tailored specifically to what you’re working on, at any stage of the litigation process. As part of the new Casetext, CARA can now use not only briefs, but also complaints, memos, and more to “understand” what you’re working on and provide tailored results. Your results will be tailored across databases, meaning you can also see briefs, holdings, black letter law, analyses, and more, all focused specifically on what you’re working on.

On top of that, we’ve upgraded our algorithms and increased the speed of our site, all to make it easier for you to find the most relevant authorities in seconds, not hours. And because of the unique algorithms that power the CARA A.I. technology, Casetext will often provide you with results that traditional research platforms will miss.

To make sure this new platform would meet our customers’ needs, we spent a ton of time working with them, seeking their feedback, and researching alongside them. We’re already hearing things like:

• “WOW! Looks like you’ve really made a major advance in how online legal research is done”
• “Now I might be using this to replace Westlaw.”
• “This is baller.”

It’s time to start using A.I. to find the best authorities, fast, so lawyers can spend less time researching and more time lawyering.

To see what the future of legal research looks like, join me for a live overview of the new Casetext May 4th at 11am PT.