For Legal Research, Brief Analysis Is The New Vogue

Just in the last 10 days, two major legal research companies have launched brief-analysis tools.

It was not all that long ago that yoga was fringe and marijuana could land you in jail. Now, it seems that everyone’s doing their downward dog before hitting the local dispensary.

In the accelerated dog years of the internet, something similar has happened with AI-powered brief analysis. Introduced just three years ago by a feisty legal research startup, brief analysis quickly became fashionable. Now, with announcements last week of new products from Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Law, it has officially gone mainstream.

The concept is simple. Think of it as a legal research wizard. Upload a brief or memorandum, and it will tell you what authorities or arguments are missing. Use it as a failsafe to check your own brief before filing or use it to look for holes in your opponent’s brief.

Just in the last 10 days, two major legal research companies have launched brief-analysis tools. On July 12, Thomson Reuters unveiled its Quick Check, a feature that will be available starting July 24 to all subscribers to Westlaw Edge. (See: AI-Driven Brief Analysis Comes to Westlaw, But Does It Differ From Competitors?)

Then last Monday, Bloomberg Law gave a preview of its forthcoming brief analyzer, which it is calling by the eponymous placeholder name Brief Analyzer, and which will be out in beta in September and then for general availability by the end of the year. (See: Now Comes Another Brief Analyzer, this from Bloomberg Law.)

Call it the trickle-up effect, because it has been three years since the first brief analyzer came to market, introduced by the innovative legal research startup Casetext. Launched in 2016, its CARA — short for Case Analysis Research Assistant — uses artificial intelligence to analyze users’ uploaded briefs and memoranda and find relevant cases the document omits.

CARA targeted two use cases. One was to analyze an opponent’s brief to see what authorities and arguments it left out (whether intentionally or not) and thereby jumpstart your reply and find weak spots in its arguments. The other was to serve as a check-and-balance on your own research, either as you are drafting a brief or before filing the final version.

Sponsored

From those initial use cases, CARA evolved into a tool to jumpstart research of any kind. CARA is now integrated within Casetext’s standard research workflow, so that a user can upload a relevant document of any kind and use it to enhance keyword queries and deliver results that are far-better matched to the facts and issues at hand.

One year after CARA launched, the American Association of Law Libraries named it new product of the year. Other legal research companies began paying attention and launched CARA variations of their own. These included Clerk from Judicata, launched in late 2017; EVA from ROSS Intelligence, launched in January 2018 as a standalone product and now integrated into the ROSS platform; and Vincent from vLex, launched in September 2018.

Of these, the most different from CARA is Clerk, which Judicata founder Itai Gurari describes as moneyball for motions. “Just as different batters have different on-base percentages, different motions have different probabilities of being granted or denied,” Gurari wrote in a 2017 blog post.

What makes Clerk unique is that it not only identifies missing cases, but it also analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of a brief’s citations and arguments in fairly granular detail, and then suggests ways to improve the arguments and the brief’s overall drafting. Clerk is undeniably cool, but so far works only for California cases.

Vincent from vLex is the only one of these AI-driven brief-analysis tools that has the ability to simultaneously analyze documents in two languages, English and Spanish. And because the vLex legal research platform is international in scope, its results span multiple jurisdictions and can even include a firm’s internal knowledge management resources.

Sponsored

So it can hardly be said that either Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg Law were breaking new ground with their announcements last week of their own brief-analyzer tools. Even so, their entries into the field and their investments of significant resources into developing their tools demonstrate that even the big players see brief analysis as valuable to their customers. And each of these new products brings something unique to the field.

TR’s Quick Check is like CARA in that it enables a lawyer to upload any document that contains at least two citations and obtain a list of other relevant authorities that the document does not cite. It also flags any cases the document does cite that may not be good law. Unlike other brief-analysis products, it delivers only a limited set of results with only the most highly relevant citations. TR says this is to make it more efficient for lawyers to use.

Probably the greatest differentiators for Quick Check are that it is included directly within Westlaw Edge and that its AI technology was developed at TR’s Center for AI & Cognitive Computing, a highly regarded AI research laboratory.

Although Bloomberg Law’s Brief Analyzer is so far only a prototype, it promises unique features as well. For one, it displays its suggested authorities side-by-side with a view of the brief itself, aligning its suggestions with the arguments and sections of the brief. For each suggestion, it provides a concise, plain-English explanation of why the authority is suggested.

No two of these brief analyzers are identical. The best way to get a sense of how they work is to try them for yourself. Even if you are not a subscriber to any of these services, you still have options for testing these tools. Both Casetext and ROSS offer 14-day free trials, and subscribers to the legal research platform Casemaker can get a free one-week trial of Vincent and then half off first-year pricing.

(You can also watch this Legal Robot Battle, in which Casetext presented a comparison of the different brief-analysis tools.)

So get yourself into a comfortable Lotus pose, light up if you care to, and give brief analysis a try.


Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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