Legal research, perhaps the first area of law considered for potential artificial intelligence-based “disruption,” hasn't yet seen the kind of wild upset of its status quo that many technologists predicted. Technologists and startups who've been working on legal research data are now, however, starting to see some of their labor pay off.

San Francisco startup Casetext this week released two new features—Black Letter Law and Holdings—that allow users to search through both undisputed law and case summaries. The two features can be accessed both through simple keyword searches and through Casetext's AI platform CARA (Case Analysis Research Assistant), which uses predictive algorithms to tailor results to a particular user, document or matter.

Casetext CEO Jake Heller explained that the company chose to build out these particular features to support attorneys looking for settled precedent. “For an attorney doing legal research, there is no better result than a case that clearly stands for the position they're taking and is well-established or well-settled precedent. We wanted to make it easier than ever for attorneys to home in on exactly those cases,” he said.

“These databases offer the accessibility and power of secondary sources (like treatises) but with the authority of primary case law,” Heller told LTN.

Casetext built out the two features by parsing through its own proprietary database. Black Letter Law relies on statements of law described by courts as “well-settled” or “well-established,” while Holdings centralizes judges' summaries of previous courts' opinions. “This is a starkly different approach than the traditional one of producing such content from hundreds of anonymous editors,” Heller said.

According to Heller, attorneys who demoed the two features were able to find relevant results to cite in their briefs “within minutes.”

Casetext's new features join a growing number of tools in the legal research technology market. Legacy players like Bloomberg are attempting to build technology to stay current in the legal research market, as with its recent “Points of Law” platform, which uses AI and data visualization to identify legal language based on keywords. Startup approaches, like Casetext's Silicon Valley contemporary Judicata, have looked at trying instead to help attorneys apply research in writing with tools like Clerk.

Casetext in particular has picked up some strong support from investors. The Y Combinator alumni company last year picked up $12 million in a Series B funding round led by Canvas Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, Union Square Ventures and 8VC.

Heller imagines that the tool will be most helpful for attorneys in a variety of situations, notably those looking to “cite relevant and authoritative precedent to support their position, orient themselves in a new area of law, find standing points of law that won't be disputed and compare similar holdings across an area of law.”

The company has also linked the features to premium features within Casetext, including a “heatmap” of texts that identify the most commonly cited parts of opinions and point to articles authored by litigators debriefing the content of cases.