Ride the Lightning

Headline News: Legal Research Competitors Fastcase and Casemaker Merge

January 7, 2021

On January 5, Bob Ambrogi reported in his LawSites blog the extraordinary (to me) news that longtime competitors in the legal research market, Casemaker and Fastcase, have merged. The new entity will operate under the Fastcase brand and will have an estimated subscriber base of more than three quarters of all lawyers in the United States.

How things change. It was over a year ago when the two companies were battling one another in federal court in Atlanta over Casemaker's claims of copyright in Georgia administrative regulations. Early in December 2019, the companies stipulated to dismissing that litigation after they reached a settlement, the terms of which were not disclosed.

Longtime rivals, the two companies competed against one another to become the preferred member benefit of state and local bar associations. The new company's subscriber base will include the bar associations of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and four-dozen metropolitan, county and specialty bar associations, for a total number of users of more than 1 million lawyers, out of an estimated 1.3 million lawyers in the country.

"Starting today," Fastcase cofounder and CEO Ed Walters said, "every member of a state bar in the country has access to legal research through our blended company."

Though things may ultimately change, both the Casemaker and Fastcase research platforms will continue to operate in their present forms and under their former brand names.

Clearly, the two companies will combine their staff and technologies to innovate their research, analytics and workflow products. All employees of both companies will remain with the merged entity, including Casemaker president and CEO Satish Sheth, who joins the Fastcase board of directors, and Fastcase co-founders Ed Walters, CEO, and Phil Rosenthal, president.

Walters told Bob that no decision has been made about the future of the two companies' research platforms. Over time, the decision will be made whether to keep one or both or possibly merge the best of each into a new platform.

Walters told Bob he is most excited about the potential that comes from combining the editorial strength of Casemaker with the "innovative DNA" of Fastcase and the other brands under its umbrella, docket and analytics company Docket Alarm, bankruptcy platform NextChapter, and, its most recent acquisition, legal research company Judicata.

"Now every time we innovate, virtually every lawyer in America gets it right away," Walters said.

This, as Bob notes, is huge news. Even though Casemaker and Fastcase were competitors, both competed against "the legal research duopoly of Thomson Reuters (with Westlaw) and LexisNexis. Love them or hate them, Wexis, as some call the duo, have dominated the legal research market to an almost monopolistic extent."

Both companies have worked successfully on becoming viable alternatives to Westlaw and Lexis. As a single company now, Fastcase is in a position to reshape the future of legal research and publishing market.

Congratulation to our friends Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal!

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
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