

Casetext (YC S13): New Angle on Legal Research With Wikipedia-Style Annotations - joannahuey
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/12/yc-backed-casetext-takes-a-new-angle-on-value-added-legal-research/

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matthewmcg
J/J: I'm a deal lawyer, so I rarely look at caselaw. But regs. and statutes
are my bread and butter. Any thoughts about how you would approach annotating
these kinds of materials?

There's of course an interesting version control problem when statutes get
amended--how do you merge your annotations which are anchored to the old text
into the new text?

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joannahuey
We're planning on adding regulations and statutes, and the annotation platform
should generally work for these texts as well. As you noted, there's a version
control issue, and we're still thinking about the best way to deal with it.
One possibility would be to have the text appear as a redline, which would
make keeping all annotations alongside the text possible. Alternatively or in
addition, we could have a revision history of the text (allowing you to view
and compare older versions) -- then, the easiest way to manage annotations
might be to keep annotations for paragraphs that haven't changed in the newer
version, but to have annotations for changed paragraphs only appear in the
older versions.

~~~
adelevie
Regulations and rulemaking info would be very useful for the area of law I'm
interested in. Though annotations would be a great addition, I think just
having a simple UX for searching and accessing these documents (Orders, filed
comments, etc) would be a huge win. This is a problem I've been working on
mostly as a hobby to scratch my own itch, and I'd be happy to discuss what
I've learned.

One big pitfall I've noticed with taming regulatory data is that often each
agency has its data siloed differently. Regulations.gov has been great for
harmonizing many, many agencies, but here's a list of all the agencies that
are currently "non-participating":
[http://www.regulations.gov/docs/Non_Participating_Agencies.p...](http://www.regulations.gov/docs/Non_Participating_Agencies.pdf).
This means you'd need a parser/scraper for each agency, assuming its
rulemaking data is even made available in a sane format (like a spreadsheet).

Anyways, best of luck. Successfully wrangling legal data seems more difficult
than building the Hyperloop.

~~~
joannahuey
Thanks for the information! It'd be great to chat some more about what you've
found out.

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mbesto
This sounds awesome. I've done a little digging (probably 6 months of probing
worht) into technology tools for lawyers (mainly in the UK) and the it's a
massively underserved and a big mess.

> _Joanna Huey attended Harvard Law School, where she was president of the
> Harvard Law Review, and Jacob Heller attended Stanford Law School, where he
> was president of the Stanford Law Review. They later served together as
> clerks for Judge Michael Boudin at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First
> Circuit in Boston, and worked at law firms._

Joanna/Jacob - I'm sure you know this already, but get some old school, grey-
haired advisors for you company. Trust me. You need to understand how these
people eat, breathe, and sleep. If there's one thing I've learned about
lawyers (especially ones who have been in the business for 20+ years) they are
_very_ picky about how they do business. These guys happen to be the guys with
all of the money as well.

~~~
joannahuey
Glad you're excited! We agree that there's a ton of room for innovation in the
area. And thanks for the advice -- definitely a great idea to better
understand the market and add to our first-hand experience.

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TheBiv
Call me crazy, but it seems like a marketplace exactly like
ThemeForest/CreativeMarket so I wonder why their business model does not
follow the ThemeForest business model...where the law firm would buy bulk
credits in $100/$200/etc increments and then they would have clerks read and
review and annotate cases which can be purchased on a micro level (like say $5
for a case) so that CaseText can provide high quality content for lawyers bc
the creators of the content would be getting a kickback.

Then, maybe, the cases could be bundled together in logical formats so that
they could distinguish themselves from the big guys by not only providing a
better tool, but logically grouping cases to ease the burden of the lawyer's
ability to search effectively!

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joannahuey
Not crazy at all! But, we think we can get higher quality annotations by
focusing on building a community of lawyers interested in demonstrating their
expertise (to build their online reputation or get referrals) than by hiring
clerks.

We are working on improving search by grouping cases by issue -- users can
already tag cases with various legal terms, and we'll incorporate those tags
into search to improve the results.

~~~
TheBiv
Fair point. I just want y'all to make money so just throwing ideas out there!
:) Good luck on y'alls journey!

btw I need to learn the lingo, bc I didn't actually mean clerks, I meant the
lawyers you were referring to...I think clerk may mean low wage unskilled
worker.

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mdelias
I'll reiterate a question appearing in the comments to the article. Is anyone
familiar with how Casetext will handle shepardizing case law ?

~~~
joannahuey
Thanks for asking! At the moment, we automatically link all citing cases and
then allow users to categorize them (by negative, distinguishing, and positive
treatment) and to write a bit of context explaining how the case is relevant.
In the future, we'd also like to automate some of the categorization.

~~~
jacobheller
To follow up on this -- we believe that over the long-run this will produce
better results than Lexis and Westlaw. Because users can add any related cases
(not just those that cite the case), you get a more complete picture of other
cases you should be looking to in your research. For example, in some circuit
splits, neither circuit cites the court that it is splitting from (and so
doesn't appear in West/Lexis' database), but would appear on our site.

Users can also vote up or down a case based on relevance. Voting will help you
quickly find the most relevant resources based on the thoughts of dozens or
hundreds of other attorneys.

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zedpm
Is there any information or policy on third-party integration / API? There are
other tools for legal writing and research that could benefit from integration
with Casetext.

~~~
joannahuey
Interesting. We haven't implemented third-party integration, but we'll
definitely think about it. Feel free to contact us if you have particular
suggestions.

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matthewmcg
Also, justification might look more "legal" in that it's a closer match for
typeset cases but I would be curious whether your users might prefer ragged
right.

~~~
joannahuey
Interesting -- we haven't gotten other requests for this change, but we'll
keep it on our radar. One possibility would be to add settings for text
display that allow people to choose justification (along with font size and
other such things).

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MWil
Congrats on getting some good press, Joanna and Jake. He never mentioned you
guys came out of YC - we'll be following you up then soon I hope.

Matt, CommentLaw

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jacobheller
Good luck on getting into YC! We love innovation in the legal space and think
we need more of it, so we'd be happy to advise you through the process --
shoot me an email or PM.

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mattkrisiloff
Go Harvard-Westlake!

