Legal research is more than just looking up who won or lost a case. With the explosion of data points available to law firms today, litigators now have the ability to go inside a case, exploring how lawyers argued for one side or the other, how a judge's decision lines up with past actions and precedent, and what a case means moving forward in other, similarly situated cases.

Released nine months ago, Casetext's CARA (Case Analysis Research Assistant) platform introduced artificial intelligence into the case research mix, helping users predict relevant cases when researching their own. But a conversation with a law firm senior partner opened Casetext CEO Jake Heller's eyes to another use for the AI research platform: case briefs.

“As soon as he said it in the feedback session, it just clicked,” Heller said. “As lawyers ourselves, that could be something that we could use before filing a brief, when responding to other people's briefs, and we immediately started researching whether it'd be possible,” Heller said.