Legal Search
The legal research landscape is changing. Prominent providers like Westlaw, LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters are challenged by start-ups like Casetext, Fastcase, Judicata and Ravel Law.
Since 2012, Ravel Law, for instance, uses data-driven, interactive visualization and analytics tools to help lawyers find, contextualize, and interpret legal information. These tools assist in analysing judges and cases, and in visualizing the search results. Casetext is a mix between a legal research platform and a publishing platform on which users, mostly lawyers, are able to publish commentaries and annotations within the text of cases. Other features include a crowd-sourced citation, automatically generated case summaries, and a heat map feature that highlights often-cited portions of texts.ROSS Intelligence applies IBM Watson's Q&A technology to legal research on bankruptcy topics. After building and training the data set, ROSS Intelligence invites users to evaluate search results. It then feeds those evaluations back into the engine to pursue tuning in the manner of recommendation engines (known, for instance from Netflix or Amazon). With this process, ROSS Intelligence tries to build a “super intelligent lawyer” which is able to provide answers to legal questions in natural language—which would be a revolutionary step for LegalTech.
5.3