ROSS Rejects Westlaw Infringement Claims, Says Thomson Reuters Using Litigation as 'Weapon'

Andrew Arruda, ROSS Intelligence. Photo by Jason Doiy/The Recorder.

ROSS Intelligence has rejected Thomson Reuters' claims from a recent lawsuit that ROSS hijacked Westlaw content to help develop its own competing product.

"These allegations are false. We did nothing wrong," wrote Andrew Arruda, co-founder and CEO of ROSS Intelligence, in a post on Medium.

Yesterday, Thomson Reuters filed a lawsuit against ROSS in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, suing the legal research startup over copyright infringement and tortious interference with a contract. The lawsuit claims that beginning in 2017, a third party named LegalEase Solutions used a bot to download and store Westlaw data in bulk, which it then passed on to ROSS Intelligence in violation of the Westlaw service agreement.

The suit alleges that ROSS contracted with LegalEase to obtain such data to help build its own legal research platform. "ROSS committed direct copyright infringement by reproducing and creating a derivative work based on plaintiffs' content, and is also secondarily liable for LegalEase's copyright infringement," the complaint said.

In his Medium post, Arruda confirmed ROSS contracted LegalEase to provide it with case law data in order to teach its artificial intelligence system "to give on-point answers directly from primary law." But Arruda said his company never asked for, or did it have any use for, proprietary data from Westlaw.

Still, there was at least one instance where LegalEase sent ROSS such data. An accompanying press release by ROSS noted that one of its engineers had complained that "LegalEase might be mixing Westlaw content in with the allowable case law content," and asked LegalEase to send case data with no other legal information. ROSS has made public both a copy of an email exchange between a company engineer and LegalEase, and the statement of work contract between it and LegalEase as well.

In his Medium post, Arruda stressed that case law cannot be protected by copyright. "It is well established that primary law is not copyrightable in the United States[, as] has long been held and as the Supreme Court reminded us last week," he wrote, citing the recent ruling in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org.

Arruda also took aim at how the lawsuit has placed financial strain on his company, and accused Thomas Reuters of looking to stifle ROSS's viability in the legal research market. "By filing this lawsuit despite its lack of merit, Westlaw is interfering with our chances of securing more funding or merging with other companies, which we need to do in order to innovate and compete with Westlaw. This is not the first time Westlaw has used litigation as a weapon."

Thomson Reuters and LegalEase did not return a request for comment at the time of publication.