ATL alt.legal Innovation Awards Winner: 5 Questions With Jake Heller
Casetext seeks to make legal research faster, less expensive, and more certain.
Above The Law launched the alt.legal ATL Innovation Awards last fall to recognize emerging companies that are addressing legal technology. Fifteen finalists pitched their startups at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Judges were Joe Borstein (Thomson Reuters and ATL alt.legal columnist), Mary Juetten (CEO and Founder of Traklight), Nicole “Niki” Black (Legal Technology Evangelist at MyCase), and Monica Bay (journalist and ATL columnist).
Following up on the event, ATL has been posing five questions to the winners. Our goal: To show you a quick look at the startups — and the people behind the tech!
Jake Heller is the CEO and founder of Casetext, which recently moved to San Francisco and closed a $12 million funding round. Heller served as an associate at Ropes & Gray in Boston from 2011 to 2013. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 2010, and his B.A. in Economics & Politics from Pitzer College in 2007.
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The company launched in 2013, and has 20 employees. Laura Safdie, who previously was a litigation associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, is the chief operating office and general counsel. Pablo Arredondo — a former litigator at Quinn Emanuel and Kirkland & Ellis, and a (Stanford) CodeX Fellow — is the vice president of legal research.
Casetext investment rounds include a Series B, led by Canvas Ventures in 2017 (whose partners previously invested in Siri and Evernote), and a Series A, led by Union Square Ventures in 2015 (the same investors behind Twitter, Etsy, tumblr, and Zynga). Casetext was also backed by Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup incubator, and raised a $1.8 million seed round from various investors, including many attorneys and industry experts.
1. What problem does your startup address, and how?
CARA (which stands for Case Analysis Research Assistant) is a legal research tool that can find on-point cases that were missed in the document it is reading. Users drag-and-drop a brief, memo, or even a substantive email into CARA, and it will find cases that are not cited in a matter of seconds. When you’ve found the cases you want to read, you can research them on Casetext’s annotated research system.
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At its core, CARA is designed to address three critical problems with legal research. First, legal research is time-consuming — the average associate spends one-third of their time on legal research. Second, it is expensive — most firms write off (i.e., don’t bill for) somewhere between 50 percent to 100 percent of time spent on legal research. And third, it’s uncertain — there’s no real way of knowing with certainty whether you’ve missed a key case or that you’ve finished your research. CARA helps you get to the right answer faster, making the activity of research more efficient, less expensive, and less uncertain.
2. What is your biggest challenge in attorney adoption of your startup?
As a relative newcomer to the legal research industry, we do not have as much brand-name recognition or visibility. So to the extent that we’re facing challenges with adoption, it’s mostly been getting the word out.
3. Has your startup changed significantly since the very beginning? How?
The one thing that’s stayed the same since our earliest days working in my living room is our commitment to never put the law behind a paywall. You will always find the full text of the cases, statutes and regulations available in our database for free. (Unfortunately, we cannot disclose the source of our database—we’re under an NDA.)
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Other than that, almost everything has changed over the past few years. We’ve built up our team, moved into an office in San Francisco, transformed CARA from an idea into a real product, and started making sales to some of the country’s largest firms as well as solo and small-firm attorneys.
Casetext founder Jake Heller and COO Laura Safdie
4. What do you wish you knew five years ago?
I wish I had truly understood from the beginning how valuable user feedback can be. As a company of lawyers, we sometimes assumed that we knew what lawyers wanted. We were on the right track with a lot of decisions. But since releasing CARA, we’ve discovered again and again to listen to what the users want — and balance that against our own assumptions and experiences practicing law. Most of the biggest improvements to CARA (including jurisdiction filters and the ability to search within CARA results) were suggestions from users. If I had fully understood that five years ago, it would have been a more straightforward path to where we are today.
5. Name one technology commonly used by lawyers today that will be obsolete in 10 years—and one we will be using in 10 years that they don’t have today.
In 10 years, Microsoft Word will be obsolete within the legal field. Lawyers will still use it (many still use WordPerfect!), but savvy lawyers will start writing briefs, contracts, and other legal documents in word processors designed specifically for lawyers, not the masses.
On the flip side, in 10 years, artificial intelligence will have a real impact on the profession. Not this nonsense about lawyers being completely replaced by computers—anyone who’s deep in the technology today can tell you how far away that is. But it is very likely that, soon, computer systems will be fed documents of the matters you’re working on—and will work proactively connecting you with the research and information that you need, the people within your firm you should talk to, and even potential clients you should pitch. That’s the future we’re helping build now, and we’re excited to be a part of it.
Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and a freelance writer for Above The Lawand other media. She co-hosts Law Technology Now (Legal Talk Network) and is a member of the California Bar. Monica can frequently be found at Yankee Stadium. Email: monicabay1@gmail.com. Twitter: @MonicaBay.
