The next generation of lawyers will approach the same old problems in very different ways. At its heart, the profession isn’t all that different than it ever was. Look up caselaw, match clauses to market, get yelled at, fill out timesheets… sunrise, sunset. But how they do those tasks keeps evolving. Hardbound copies of Shepard’s gave way to online research, tools scour thousands of contracts to find the language the client needs, Zoom opened up new frontiers in accepting verbal abuse, and bots track billable hours. A whole new assortment of technologies to perform essentially age-old tasks.
But where do they learn about these new technologies?
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The National Society for Legal Technology maintains a Legal Research Technology curriculum employed by more than 350 universities, law schools, and other legal education programs across 11 countries. And this week, Descrybe joined the list of tools alongside Lexis+, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, Fastcase, and HeinOnline as one of the six core research tools in the curriculum. It takes this place as the replacement for Casetext, which joined the Westlaw family when Thomson Reuters acquired the company for $650 million. TR has pulled the plug on the independent, free Casetext tool and brought their technology fully under the TR roof.
For that matter, Fastcase became vLex and now becomes Clio because legal tech moves… fast.
“It’s a proud moment to see Descrybe joining the ranks of the world’s most respected research tools — and to know we’re helping move the field forward,” said Kara Peterson, Descrybe co-founder and a 2024 ABA Women of Legal Tech honoree.
Descrybe’s toolkit offers natural language search, simplified case summaries, citation analysis, issue-level insights, a brief checker, and bilingual access to over 3.6 million federal and state court opinions. Like Casetext before it, Descrybe has a free option, but its power is in the low cost — $20/month — option that gives users extra features and access to tools like Cytator, which sounds like a Marvel villain who subpoenas planets.
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“As a legal technology education expert and industry consultant, I’ve evaluated countless tools that promise to streamline legal research and analysis—but few deliver with the precision and practicality of Descrybe,” said Doug Lusk, Founder and CEO of NSLT. “This platform stands out for its ability to distill complex court opinions into clear, accessible summaries while preserving the nuance and legal significance of the original text. Descrybe empowers attorneys, paralegals, and law students to engage with judicial content more efficiently and with greater confidence. In an era where time and clarity are at a premium, Descrybe.ai is setting a new standard for how legal information is consumed and understood.”
The subtext, of course, is as loud as an online legal research price quote: the industry is slowly, grudgingly realizing that it needs $20-a-month tools. The most consistent tech complaint in my inbox involves a small or solo practice lawyer rending garments and gnashing teeth over the loss of Casetext. Descrybe smelled blood and filled the gap faster than a Supreme Court clerk opening a FedEx package from Leonard Leo.
Because there’s a price point in this market that needs lower cost options. Not every client is made of money. In fact, most of them aren’t. And it’s not just indigent clients… with the rising cost of legal services, there are middle class clients who balk at the cost of lawyers. The last thing they need is to be covering a firm’s massive online research overhead. There will be law students who end up serving that market and they need to know how to get winning results with the tools built to take advantage of that space.
Which is all to say that there’s a perfect — perhaps Casetext-sized place — for Descrybe to fill in this curriculum.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.