Posted on October 23, 2019 by Joseph Lamport
Last week, Casetext fired the latest salvo in the ongoing battle to bring AI powered tools to the legal research marketplace, launching a new product on their Casetext search platform, which now provides users with an AI powered search capability that has been optimized for patent law research. The announcement marks an important step forward in harnessing the power of AI for purposes of legal research by delivering search results that are tailored precisely to the specific patent that is being researched.
This new patent-law search called Cara Patent is a clear sign that Casetext is not letting up with the pace of innovation that has already made them the market leader in AI-powered legal research. Just three years ago they launched CARA A.I., which represented a dramatic advance in the use of AI technology to enable machine learning of language-based primary source materials such as legal decisions and briefs. Casetext more or less caught both Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis napping by being the first to bring to market an AI powered easy to use, drag and drop search capability in which each legal document becomes its own form of query.
The genius of Casetext’s revolutionary approach to legal research is that it manages to be both far more powerful than traditional search algorithms and much easier to use. The drag and drop interface is something every lawyer can grasp intuitively and yet under the hood the search engine relies on an entirely new AI-enabled search paradigm, which extracts the informatics (or rich contextual information) directly embedded in the brief or legal decision being researched.
Westlaw and Lexis have struggled to catch up, introducing their own versions of drag and drop search capability earlier this year. But now Castext has pushed ahead again with CARA Patent, showing their commitment to maintain market leadership in unleashing the full potential of AI to drive further innovation in legal research.
“When I first started working on CARA, I kept thinking about how useful AI technology could have been in my IP practice,” said Pablo Arredondo, Casetext’s Chief Product Officer and former Kirkland & Ellis IP litigator. “It felt so backward that the people tasked with protecting the latest, most cutting-edge technologies were relying on out-dated, inefficient tools. With CARA Patent, IP specialists now have access to the technology needed to bring their work-product up to the standards of their most tech-savvy clients.”
In addition to leveraging Arredondo’s own background as an IP lawyer, Casetext worked closely with leading IP litigators from a few of their clients, including Quinn Emanuel and Reed Smith, to develop CARA Patent’s product requirements. Key to the new Casetext approach is the fact that each patent has its own lineage or history. “Patents,” as Arredondo explains, “reference each other just the way case law decisions do.” And now CARA Patent allows that rich patent history to be incorporated or reflected in the results returned with each search query.
“I don’t want to reveal too much of our specific roadmap for development going forward,” Arredondo says. “But the field of law is composed of many domains. And we regularly hear from our clients – particularly from the 40 AmLaw 200 firms that are using CARA already – how they would like more domain-specific search capability. With CARA and CARA Patent, we are just at the beginning of harnessing AI’s capability to enhance the quality of legal research.”
