Bob Ambrogi

It was 20 years ago that two Covington & Burling associates, Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal, made the audacious move of quitting their jobs and launching the legal research company Fastcase. Their goal was to democratize the law through affordable pricing and smarter technology. Two decades later, that once-scrappy company is now a major…

In this corner: CARA, the original AI-powered brief-analysis tool introduced in 2016 by the legal research company Casetext.

In the other corner: Well, no one really, except empty seats behind name cards bearing the names of other brief-analysis products and an audience of curious onlookers.

But its competitors’ no-shows did not stop Casetext from…

[Updated to include comments from Mark Harris, Knowable CEO, and Ritu Khanna, executive vice president, Global Strategy & Acquisitions, at LexisNexis.]

LexisNexis Legal & Professional today announced that it has entered into an agreement to form a joint venture with Knowable, a company that uses machine-learning technology to help companies better understand their…

Thomson Reuters said today that it has acquired HighQ, a London-based enterprise collaboration and file-sharing platform for the legal industry.

HighQ has more than 400 customers, including more than half of the Global 100 largest law firms, TR said in announcing the acquisition.

It was just a year ago that HighQ announced an…

Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of the legal practice management company Clio, has joined the board of directors of ROSS Intelligence, the AI-powered legal research service.

“I’m honored to join ROSS Intelligence’s Board, and I look forward to playing a role in guiding the company’s growth in the years to come,” Newton…

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of my podcast LawNext, focused on interviews with the “innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what’s next in law.”

Starting it was a bit of a gamble. As I explained in another post, Why I’m Signing Off the Podcast I’ve Done for 13 Years,…

By any measure, the London-based legal AI startup Luminance has had spectacular success. Not yet three years old, it has raised $23 million in funding, has achieved a valuation of $100 million, is used by more than 150 organizations on six continents, and has won numerous technology awards, including the prestigious Queen’s Award…

Last Friday, I wrote here about the launch by Thomson Reuters of Quick Check, its version of a growing array of brief-analysis products that let lawyers upload a brief and discover relevant cases the brief missed. Now comes another such product, as Bloomberg Law gave a preview of its forthcoming brief analyzer during…

In 2016, Casetext, the legal research startup, introduced CARA, a tool that uses artificial intelligence to analyze users’ uploaded briefs and memoranda and find relevant cases the document missed. Lawyers could use it to vet an opponent’s brief for omitted cases or to double-check their own research before submitting the document.

CARA won recognition…

If you are attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries starting Saturday in Washington, D.C., then consider attending Monday’s “super session” on the use of litigation analytics in federal and state courts.

The 2.5 hour session will include three separate panels — one of which I will moderate —…

Subscribers to the legal research company Casetext can now get access to public and business records at a reduced cost, as the result of a new partnership between the company and Tracers, a provider of public records data to law firms, software integrators, technology partners and others.

Tracers has long been providing public…

Annually since 2011, legal research company Fastcase has named the Fastcase 50, an award that honors “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders.” Today, Fastcase named its 2019 honorees, a list that includes practicing lawyers, legal academics, law librarians, corporate counsel, journalists, company executives, bar leaders, and government officials.

[Full disclosure:…