In news of a major new alliance, competitor legal research companies ROSS Intelligence and Fastcase have announced a content, research, and development partnership enabling ROSS to achieve ‘data completeness’ within its platform, which now contains case law, statutes, and regulations across all 50 states.
Of particular note is the fact that Fastcase and ROSS say they will be progressively developing additional product integrations and joint features, to be released in the coming months.
“When we started ROSS Intelligence, we understood natural language processing and machine learning would afford new entrants the opportunity to innovate. We also soon realized how daunting the task of building, collecting, and updating caselaw, statutes, and regulations across 50 states would be. By partnering with Fastcase we have the opportunity to tie into their strong data pipeline, as well as work with a constant innovator in the legal publishing space,” said Andrew Arruda, CEO and Co-founder of ROSS.
“Fastcase encourages startups across the ecosystem and has developed an extremely large and devoted client base over the last twenty years. We’re thrilled to further cement our partnership with Fastcase, allowing us to not only deepen our legal data repository on the ROSS platform, but to also put our artificial intelligence technology in front of Fastcase’s 900,000 plus subscribers. And this is all just the very beginning of what is to come.”
Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase said: “We’ve long admired the ROSS team, along with their passion, energy and trailblazing work in the field of natural language processing and machine learning.
“This partnership with ROSS allows us to collaborate on exciting, new products to the benefit of Fastcase customers. It also allows us to jointly create new solutions for unaddressed needs in the legal profession.”
The partnership has the potential to further Fastcase’s ability to challenge dominant legal research providers LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters.
A 2017 survey of the U.S. legal publishing market among Clio users asked what tool they use for legal research, and users reported that Westlaw, Fastcase, and LexisNexis were their tools of choice, in that order. With more than 2,100 respondents, 20.58% reported that Westlaw was their tool of choice, and 20.35% reported that Fastcase was their favorite legal research service. LexisNexis was a close third with 20.21% of users.
The partnership follows a ‘battle’ of words between ROSS and freemium US legal research platform Casetext, which last year launched its AI-based legal research tool CARA AI. Casetext caused ripples at Legalweek New York in January for challenging ROSS to an an AI ‘robot-off’/.
Reacting to news of the ROSS/Fastcase partnership on social media, our favourite comment was from Toronto based author and innovation professor Mitch Kowalskit, who simply said: “Whoa!”