2024 LA First Look Retreat — The Casetext Journey: Building Through Multiple Eras of AI
Fika hosted its 9th annual LA First Look Retreat at the iconic Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in sunny San Marino, CA. The event’s historic setting served as the backdrop to bring together distinguished guests from Los Angeles’ community along with innovators and leaders in tech and investing. The breadth and diversity of First Look has established the event as one of Los Angeles’ premier tech gatherings with attendees flying in from across the country.
The day kicked off with a series of keynote presentations from industry leaders, addressing a variety of noteworthy topics.
Fika Partner, John Chen, led an engaging fireside chat with Jake Heller, Co-Founder and CEO of Casetext, on the company’s 10-year journey, the influence of AI on the legal industry, and the future of startups amidst the broader pullback in venture capital. Jake also shares his experiences and insights from selling his company for $650 million to Thomson Reuters.
Summary
Jake Heller walked through their main product CoCounsel, which functions as an AI assistant that can conduct research, review documents and contracts, and complete tasks more efficiently. This technology allows lawyers to provide high-quality services at a lower cost and with greater efficiency, freeing them up to focus on more complex tasks.
“The idea is that CoCounsel is another member of a legal team for a law firm, non-profit, corporate legal department, etc. And we can literally just talk to it, ‘Hey, I need you to do some research for me, or review these 1,000 or a million documents, and tell me what’s in them’, or ‘review these contracts, and edit them,’ and it just does it,” said Heller.
“Our focus, from the very beginning to the present, was around how do we empower lawyers to do work so efficiently, so effectively, and ultimately, enabling them to provide high quality but low-cost services to their clients,” he added.
Heller also addressed how existing companies can adapt to AI and the advantages they might have over new, AI-native startups. Despite being a “pre-AI” company, Casetext could successfully incorporate large language models (LLMs) into its products. For such companies, existing customers, brand recognition, and a deep understanding of customer needs can be significant advantages.
“For many of you here, you may have some advantages — customers, brand, content, network effects, whatever it may be — that can catapult you into a really good situation in a post-LLM world, if you choose to adopt the technology and build new products on top of it,” said Heller.
Despite the current hype around AI, Heller believes that the technology is underhyped. While many focus on the generative aspect of AI, he argues that the intelligence of these models is often undervalued. With the ability to perform tasks traditionally carried out by white-collar workers, AI has massive potential to revolutionize several employment sectors and create considerable economic opportunities.
“I do think a lot that professionals… will have [advantages] over artificial intelligence for a very, very long time. And the dividing lines may not be kind of what you’d expect, but the common theme is going to be where can the artificial intelligence gather data from and where can it not?” he added.
To close out the conversation, Heller weighed in on what he believed to be the future of startup and company building — the “1P, 1B,” or “One-Person-Billion-Dollar” company. With AI capabilities, a small team can create a company with enormous value. AI can help with customer support, coding, QA, and gathering customer feedback, enabling smaller teams to do more and scale rapidly.
“So I think that’s the future of some startups is building something massively valuable with a small team,” Heller concluded.
