Casetext, a free legal research website where users can read legal texts annotated by a community of practicing attorneys, announces today it has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Formation 8, and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer.
This investment adds to the $1.8 million in seed funding the company secured in October 2013 from investors including SV Angel, Crosslink Capital, A-Grade Investments, Susa Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, and BoxGroup, among others. Casetext, a Y Combinator company, will use this round of funding to expand its legal database and enhance its platform as it builds toward becoming the best resource for reading, understanding, and sharing legal commentary online.
Launched in 2013 as a new way to do legal research, Casetext allows lawyers to share commentary linked to millions of judicial cases and statutes on a research platform that’s easy to use and no cost to the public. Casetext attracts over 250,000 users each month, and since launching the website’s legal community architecture in late 2014, now has thousands of attorneys tapping Casetext’s network for insights related to their practice areas. The company is the brainchild of CEO Jake Heller, a former litigator and president of the Stanford Law Review, and is taking on one of the biggest inefficiencies facing the legal market.
Heller stated, “We’re taking a totally different approach to legal research. The old way of doing things misses the most valuable source of legal knowledge: the legal community itself. Lawyers already share insight about the law publicly to demonstrate thought leadership and grow their reputation. By building the best platform to write commentary on the law, we’re able to collaborate with the legal community to create an insightful, free legal resource for lawyers and the public. And we’re disrupting an $8 billion legal research market in the process.”
“Casetext takes an innovative approach that will change the way lawyers do business,” explained John Buttrick, partner at Union Square Ventures, who will be joining Casetext’s board. “Having worked with some of the most transformative community based platforms, like Twitter, Etsy, Stack Exchange, and Kickstarter, we see a huge opportunity for innovation in the law. We have great confidence in Casetext’s talented team and their commitment to making the law understandable through crowdsourced legal knowledge.”
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