Earlier this week, ROSS Intelligence and legal research platform Fastcase announced they had entered into a partnership geared towards content, research and development. Exactly what fruit the collaboration will ultimately yield remains to be seen, but chances are that at least some of it will have to do with the growing field of regulatory compliance.

Tools geared towards understanding or meeting obligations presented under the General Data Protection Regulation or California Consumer Privacy Act, for example, have become a fixture of the legal tech marketplace. While Fastcase has steadily beefed up its analytic capabilities with acquisition of Docket Alarm and the introduction of an AI Sandbox platform, CEO Ed Walters indicated that the company has not fully developed its product around regulatory alerts.

"I think that's a great frontier for legal research. It's more proactive, it follows industries, not queries and there's so much regulatory activity across different states and the federal government. Intelligent tools [can] help people track the developing regulations will be really important for lawyers," Walters said.

While he couldn't point to a specific regulatory field that the ROSS partnership would be targeting with any potential tools put into development, Walters did let on that AI would likely be a critical component in helping to cut down on the time spent tracking, reading and understanding new laws.

"Our hope is to work with ROSS Intelligence and develop an entirely new category, a new class of tools, that leverage artificial intelligence and real-time updating from Fastcase and ROSS," Walters said.

Andrew Arruda,  CEO and co-founder of ROSS, was more reticent about how the company's artificial intelligence technology would feature in the partnership.

"Without giving too much away, I can say that we will be making parts of our industry-leading AI search capabilities available to Fastcase's 900,000 plus users, as well as building features and products in tandem with Fastcase's product and engineering team," Arruda wrote via email.

ROSS hasn't been shy about making new friends as of late. In October, the company announced that users of the cloud-based software provider Clio would have access to its Document Analyzer product, which draws on a database of U.S. federal and state cases.

Speaking of data, Arruda stressed the importance that ROSS places on symbiotic product benefits in a partnership — which in this case includes access to Fastcase's own information pipeline.  The ROSS platform's data repository  has been updated to reflect case law, regulations and statutes from all 50 states.

"Strategically speaking, our partnership enables ROSS to benefit from a tremendous swath of data that we previously did not have access to along with access to long-standing relationships stemming from [Fastcase's] twenty years in business which we don't yet have," Arruda said.

To be sure, ROSS and Fastcase are far from the only legal research companies on the block looking to improve their functionality. Last July, Thomson Reuters added an AI-powered automated brief analyzer called Quick Check to its Westlaw Edge platform. Meanwhile, the Lexis  Nexis announced its intention in January 2019 to update its Lexis Advance platform with a chatbot that could help guide users in their research.

As for new entrants to the AI-search space, knowledge equals power — and that may be hard to come by.

"While new entrants will need to build out partnerships with providers of primary law, this may become increasingly difficult due to the relatively small number of those providers on the market," Arruda said.

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