Bloomberg Law brief analyzer, document upload screen. Bloomberg Law brief analyzer, document upload screen. Screenshot courtesy of Bloomberg Law.
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At an event Tuesday at the 2019 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting, Bloomberg Law revealed what it hopes will be its own research game changer: an automated research tool.

The tool is not yet ready for public consumption—it doesn't even yet have a final name. However, the product was available for demos at an off-site AALL event, where it was displayed to attending law librarians and members of the press. Bloomberg Law expects the brief analyzer to be ready for beta testing in September. Afterwards, the timing of the wide release will depend on the beta test.

The tool functions by dragging and dropping a brief into the system—currently, the system supports only PDFs, though Joe Breda, president of Bloomberg Law, expects Word to be included as a file type by the product's public launch date. The system then originally breaks down the brief into three panels, with a table of contents, the text being analyzed at a given moment, and a panel with three tabs: cited in argument, suggested content and opinion search.

Bloomberg Law brief analyzer, citation page. Bloomberg Law brief analyzer, citation page. Screenshot courtesy of Bloomberg Law.

From the cited authorities, users can click to analyze opinions, statutes and points of law. The latter connects to the Points of Law offering within the Bloomberg Law system, providing other cases that are most cited or ones that may be of interest in other ways. The opinions and statutes, meanwhile, provide full extracts from where the brief cites.

The suggested content tab will likely be the one that receives the most attention, and is where the company's artificial intelligence comes into play. That tab itself breaks down into three buttons—court opinions, similar briefs, and practical guidance.

The analyzer provides examples of opinions or briefs that may have been missed in the brief, initially sorted by predicted usefulness. Each suggestion contains plain language, specifically one line statements on why it suggested a certain case, such as points of law, jurisdiction, or other issues that may be similar. The practical guidance tab draws from the Litigation Practical Guidance offering elsewhere within the Bloomberg Law system, providing tips, checklists and annotated model documents aimed at helping primarily associates who may not be as familiar with the subject of the brief.

Bloomberg Law brief analyzer, suggested briefs. Bloomberg Law brief analyzer, suggested briefs. Screenshot courtesy of Bloomberg Law.

All of this, of course, is subject to change based on the beta. Breda noted that the current system is set up for a primary use case of analyzing opponent briefs, but he sees a future where an attorney's own briefs are loaded into the system as well. When asked of potential use cases, Breda noted existing documents for precedent “to very quickly 'update' the exemplar by validating that cited law is still good, and finding newer or more relevant cases,” and also a final check of briefs as the side-by-side of text and recommendations ”make our tool the perfect drafting companion.”

The goal is to match how associates work in their daily research, the company said. Breda added that the platform's focus is also pure time savings. “Our goal with this product is to both accelerate the process of research and drafting and simultaneously increase the quality of the end product,” he explained. “It also greatly simplifies the process. The researcher doesn't need to know where and how to search—we bring the results to them. The future of legal research is push, not pull.”

A number of different legal technology companies have recently focused on the brief as an area of automation. Casetext introduced its CARA automated research tool in 2016 to much fanfare, and just last week, Thomson Reuters introduced its own Quick Check tool to similarly find missing links in briefs.

Where Bloomberg is hoping to set itself apart is through the singularity of its Bloomberg Law platform and its integration with other parts of the company's tech portfolio. As Bloomberg Law is offered as a single product, the brief analyzer will be available at launch automatically for all customers without an additional fee. Breda also noted that the product will link not only to the aforementioned Points of Law and Practical Guidance, but to a number of other Bloomberg tools as well, including SmartCode (case law interpretations, BCite (authority analysis), and DocketKey (sample briefs and PACER analysis).

The brief analyzer offering will also conform to Bloomberg Law security measures: Users will have the option whether to store data in the system or wipe it after each use. Keys to any stored data are kept in a separate server, in U.S. data centers, with nothing in the public cloud. Breda said Bloomberg Law will make its terms and conditions explicit at launch.

It remains to be seen what the final product looks like, but Breda said the company has been working on the product for over a year, with more improvements potentially on the way. And if nothing else, this release and others show that the process of researching briefs is rapidly changing, and quickly.