Today Casetext announced it raised $8.2 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Y Combinator Continuity and an undisclosed Am Law 100 law firm. Casetext co-founder and CEO Jake Heller told Legaltech News that the undisclosed law firm now has an ownership stake in the company.

Casetext's latest capital arrives a month after launching its automated brief-writing platform Compose in February. 

Heller said Casetext will use the $8.2 million to hire more engineers, marketers and salespeople and bring Compose's parallel search technology, which allows the search of supporting case fillings, to Casetext's eponymous original legal research platform.

However, most of the new funding will be utilized to enhance Compose's features, Heller noted. Those features include formatting briefs to comply with more jurisdictions and culling information from dockets and evidence into Compose. 

Casetext also plans to expand its three initial brief types for federal court jurisdictions to 50 brief types spanning 12 state court-level jurisdictions in roughly a year, he said.

Those various briefs include employment and bankruptcy law-related briefs and expanding Compose's brief formatting to California, Florida, Illinois, New York and other state courts.

Along with meeting clients' needs for automated-brief writing, Heller said he's seeing more general counsels and law firms heeding automation's price-savings and cost predictability.

"For the first time, corporate legal departments that never did litigation work themselves are starting to take it on to save costs," Heller explained. "And law firms are saying they're moving to flat fees or cost predictability in a much more serious way."

A recession, Heller said, would heighten those needs. To be sure, Heller acknowledged that litigation work could likely dry up in tough economic times, which could severely impact a brief-writing platform.

But he noted that, while a distressed economy may lead to less litigation, company restructuring, bankruptcy and employment disputes could ensue. In turn, lawyers in those practice groups will likely need legal tech that can automate those practices to meet clients' predictability and lower pricing expectations.

"You are seeing almost certainly some increase in that type of activity, and as a consequence we are somewhat optimistic legal tech, as compared to other industries, will be somewhat insulated," Heller said. "It depends on what it's you are doing, if you're helping people do things that aren't business essentials, you may be more at risk."

Today's $8.2 million investment brings Casetext's total funding to over $40 million since its 2013 founding, according to the company. In 2017 Casetext secured $12 million from Canvas Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, Union Square Ventures, 8VC and other investors.

Casetext has used previous funding to add an AI-powered brief finder into its Case Analysis Research Assistant (CARA) research platform in 2017. In 2018 it also added a revamped "contextual" AI-based search to CARA, while in 2019 Casetext expanded its search abilities to patents with CARA Patent.