Full Court Press

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…

Legal research company Fastcase continues to expand the breadth of materials available to subscribers through its platform. Less than a week after announcing the addition of public records data, the company today says a partnership with the American Bar Association will allow paid access to select book titles published by key ABA sections.…

Fastcase today is announcing a partnership with legal publisher James Publishing to add its entire collection of some 90 legal treatises, books and practice guides to the Fastcase library, where they can be searched along with other legal materials and accessed in digital form.

The James publications are available to all Fastcase subscribers,…

On the surface, the Fastcase acquisition of legal news site Law Street, reported here yesterday, may seem puzzling, given that the site has been dormant for more than a year. But Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO, says there were good reasons for the acquisition.

Speaking by phone last night, Walters said that expanding…

[Update: Fastcase CEO Explains Why He Acquired A Dormant Legal News Site.]

Legal research company Fastcase has acquired Law Street Media, a company that operates a free legal news site “written by and for Millennials,” particularly law students and young legal professionals.

Fastcase says it will retool the site and relaunch it…

Except for California, every U.S. state bar offers a member benefit of free access to a legal research service, typically either Fastcase or Casemaker. Until today, California has been the lone exception.

But this morning, the California Lawyers Association and Fastcase announced a partnership through which the CLA’s roughly 60,000 members will…

The Mississippi Bar today announced that it is switching the research service it offers as a free benefit to its members from Casemaker to Fastcase. The switch will take effect for its more than 9,000 members on June 1.

“This new partnership allows us to support our members by providing free access…

At the annual meeting of the American Bankruptcy Institute on April 20, I moderated a plenary panel, “Artificial Intelligence: Why It Matters To Your Future Bankruptcy Practice.” In advance of the panel, the ABI recorded a series of video interviews I conducted with some of the panelists. Here is…

A few weeks ago, in a post here about Fastcase’s addition of blog commentary from the LexBlog Network, I wrote that for any legal research company aiming to compete in the big leagues against the likes of Westlaw and LexisNexis, “secondary content is the Holy Grail.”

Well, in its own quest…

The new Fastcase 7 start page.

The legal research service Fastcase is today unveiling a complete overhaul of its platform, its first entirely new version since 2003. The new version, called Fastcase 7, promises greater speed, expanded search, more intuitive functionality, and a more readable interface.

“We want to…

For the second successive year, the Fastcase legal research app is the most popular legal app among lawyers, according to the 2014 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report. The most popular business app among lawyers this year is LinkedIn, the survey said.

Among lawyers who reported having downloaded a legal-specific app, 36.5% listed Fastcase. Last year,…