Casetext

// about Casetext

Casetext is a legal AI company founded in 2013, backed by Y Combinator and Union Square Ventures. It started as a community platform where attorneys could annotate and share case law, then spent a decade gradually moving toward automated legal workflows. CoCounsel, its GPT-4-powered assistant launched in March 2023, is where that decade of work landed. CoCounsel drafts legal research memos, reviews and summarizes documents, builds deposition prep packages from discovery files, and analyzes contracts for missing clauses and risk terms. It covers both litigation and transactional work, which is less common than it sounds; most legal AI tools pick a lane. The deposition prep feature in particular is the kind of thing that previously took a junior associate a full day. Before launch, Casetext's Trust Team put CoCounsel through more than 30,000 legal questions, logging close to 4,000 hours of fine-tuning. The company had received early access to GPT-4 from OpenAI, and that head start showed. The product launched already shaped around real legal tasks rather than retrofitted from general chat. Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext in August 2023 for $650 million cash. The company had over 10,000 law firm and corporate legal department customers at the time. CoCounsel is now part of the Thomson Reuters product line, sitting alongside Westlaw and Practical Law.