Legal research technology provider Casetext has announced a major update of its platform that expands the functionality of its Case Analysis Research Assistant (CARA) and updates the product's user-interface and processing speed.

Up until recently, the AI-powered CARA had been mainly deployed as a tool attorneys could “drag and drop” their brief into. CARA would then analyze the brief to find potential missing arguments or case law. But now, “we are integrating our legal research engine with CARA,” said Jake Heller, CEO of Casetext.

“With a drag and drop of a complaint or brief or any document you are working on and the addition of a few simple keywords, you can quickly find the most important cases for your matter,” Heller explained. For example, should a user upload a complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York pertaining to fraud at a Brazilian company, the search engine will surface results related to fraud, international companies and that particular district court.

The new search features therefore uses CARA to “contextualize the search experience to the facts, legal issues, jurisdictions and motion issues,” Heller said.

Heller noted the impetus to expand CARA came primarily from client desires to research more efficiently, and the fact that many clients were already using CARA as a stepping stone into broader legal research.

“CARA was originally designed to be a brief check tool, but people would spend seven or 10 hours on it, and that surprised us. They said if I can just drag and drop a brief into CARA, it will find me the more on-point relevant cases to what I am working on, and that is a better place to start for legal research than using traditional tools,” he explained.

To further help clients research more efficiently, Casetext also updated its user interface (UI) to make it “cleaner, crisper, and even simpler to use than in the past,” Heller said. In addition, the company worked on the back end of the platform to make it “dramatically faster and dramatically more responsive,” he added.

Casetext's search expansion and new UI come just months after the company updated its platform to allow users to search through both undisputed law and case summaries and receive case notification alerts. And now trained and fully ready to deploy, the expanded CARA is able to continue learning on its own.

“The system is absolutely getting smarter as people use it,” Heller said, explaining that it recognizes and learns what search entries are most relevant for any particular user. However, “it won't get specifically smarter for one particular brief and train around that one brief; for privacy and security reasons, we don't do that,” Heller added.

Casetext has its fair share of competitors in the legal research field. Bloomberg, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, and Westlaw all offer legal research platforms, while Ross Intelligence also recently released a case analysis tool named EVA.

Heller, however, argued that Casetext stands out because it is “now objectively the fastest of all legal research applications.” He added that the update also “cuts through the difficulty of finding primary law authorities and completely changes the paradigm of how you search online for primary source authorities.”