Technology

As ROSS Wraps Up, Pondering Its Legacy

Over six years, they proved that a feisty startup could truly make a dent in the market.

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I have to admit that this year had me reading obituaries. I wondered about the people whose lives were cut short. I wondered what their lives had been like. I wondered about the family and friends and colleagues they left behind.

And I wondered about the legacies of all those lost lives. Not legacies in the financial sense, but the lives they touched, the ways they shaped their communities, and the impacts they had on the people around them.

“We’re here,” Steve Jobs reportedly said, “to put a dent in the universe.” We all make a dent, each in our own way. That is our legacy.

Companies, like people, leave legacies. This fact struck home this week as I pondered the death of ROSS Intelligence, the company that helped pioneer the use of artificial intelligence in legal research, whose decision to shut down I reported Friday.

The death felt premature, like so many of this year’s deaths. And its direct impact was not just on a corporate entity or a balance sheet, but on the very-human people who were part of the company and who helped it grow over the years.

Innovation ain’t easy. Taking on the status quo ain’t easy. Companies that attempt to shake things up risk failure. Many do, in fact, fail. Some fail, frankly, because of a bad idea. Others fail because of poor execution or management. And some fail simply because they are ahead of the curve, because the market isn’t ready for them.

I’ve seen many companies or products fail over the years. Last year, for example, brought the death of Tali, a product that allowed users to track their time through voice commands using Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

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Just a year earlier, it had won a $100,000 innovation prize in Clio’s inaugural Launch//Code competition as the best new integration with the Clio practice management platform. The product truly was innovative. But it never found enough of a market to sustain itself.

Even products from established companies sometimes fail. We saw this in 2017, when LexisNexis shut down its Firm Manager practice management software after six years of development. it had been the company’s answer to platforms such as Clio, MyCase, Rocket Matter, and PracticePanther, but it never gained significant traction.

Sometimes the deaths of companies are barely noticed, except by those who were their employees and customers. But the death of ROSS seems to me more palpable. I think that is because its legacy extends across the legal industry and is, in a sense, even greater than its actual product.

In fact, for a time, its product had all the presence of a phantom. As I recounted in a lengthy post after visiting the company last year, ROSS for years maintained a shroud of secrecy around its product.

I’d pestered CEO Andrew Arruda for years to let me review it, without success. At a conference of law librarians in 2017, Arruda was called out during a panel for his company’s lack of transparency. I had trouble finding anyone who would say they had used the product.

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But as I also recounted in that same post, the company last year did an about-face, shredding any last strands of that shroud and instead opening the product for free trials by anyone, and inviting me to Toronto for an unrestricted look behind the curtain.

The secrecy, Arruda told me then, had been to protect the company’s technology. As one of the earliest companies to focus on AI in legal research, they believed they were building something unique, and they feared that a competitor would steal it out from under them. So they kept the product close to the vest until they were confident it was ready.

While ROSS feared theft of its technology by a competitor, the ironic twist of fate is that a competitor now claims it was ROSS that was the thief, and it is the litigation engendered by that claim that has caused ROSS to wind down its operations.

Of course, it isn’t just any competitor making this claim — it is Thomson Reuters, owner of Westlaw, the 800-pound gorilla of the legal research world, a gorilla with all the bananas it needs to bankroll an extended court battle, if need be.

That left ROSS unable to raise new financing and an unattractive prospect for acquisition. As its operating capital dwindled, it had no choice but to shut down.

The litigation may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. ROSS had already been looking for new investors or an acquisition before the lawsuit came along. It had experimented with different sales models and targeted different legal audiences.

Even six years after its founding, ROSS was trying to introduce a novel product into a crowded field. The legal research market remains dominated by Westlaw and LexisNexis, but is also home to increasingly established midmarket companies such as Fastcase, which claims to now have 900,000 subscribers, and Casemaker, as well as other innovative startups, most notably in recent years Casetext.

But ROSS does leave a legacy that is greater than simply the product it developed and the talented people who helped develop it. In fact, it is a double legacy.

First, it opened our minds to the idea of artificial intelligence in legal research. In its early days, ROSS was both fueled and hampered by click-bait media reports that positioned it as a robot lawyer — or worse, as the robot that would replace lawyers.

But that media attention gave ROSS a podium from which to help drive the discussion about AI in law, and ultimately, thereby, to help temper fears and drive acceptance.

ROSS was not the first company to use AI in legal research technology. In fact, that honor probably goes to Thomson Reuters, the very company that is driving ROSS out of business. But ROSS — and, in particular, CEO Arruda — made it a ubiquitous topic for a time, at seemingly every legal conference and in every legal publication. Without ROSS, our acceptance of AI might not have been as quick.

Its second legacy is that it helped open the legal research market to innovation. For decades, the duopoly of Westlaw and LexisNexis dominated that market. Others, of course, had edged in, most notably Fastcase and Casemaker, thanks in part to their unique models of selling bar-affinity deals, and there have always been other startups in this space, some that survived, some that did not.

But ROSS came into the market in an almost ostentatious way that trumpeted, “We’re not afraid to take on the status quo.” Over six years, they proved that a feisty startup could truly make a dent in the market.

Here again, ROSS was not alone in this. Companies such as Casetext and Judicata (which Fastcase recently acquired) have similarly shown that smaller players can have big impacts. In fact, both Westlaw and LexisNexis have adapted ideas first put forth by these startups.

Still, the legacy of ROSS is, in part, that the door is now open wider for other feisty startups to come along and make their own dents in the legal research universe — or broader legal technology universe. If they do it using AI, which is likely the case, all the better.

So even as ROSS winds down, its impact on the legal technology market — its dent — will continue to be felt. In that sense, it lives on.

Robert 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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