Casetext Announces LegalPad, a Technology to Transform the Way that the Legal Profession Writes about the Law
Palo Alto, CA (PRWEB) June 18, 2015 -- Today Casetext, an innovative, free legal resource announced the launch of a new writing tool, LegalPad. The technology is aimed at helping lawyers do something core to the profession: write about the law. LegalPad is free to use, and allows authors to write and share legal commentary with the more than 350,000 people who use Casetext to search the law and legal analysis every month.
“Legal writing is exceptionally hard. You feel constantly buried in dozens of sources, trying to keep quotes and citations straight,” says Casetext Founder and CEO Jake Heller. “We crafted technology to help writers focus on what matters most: developing their message.” Heller, a former litigator and president of the Stanford Law Review, explains: “This is something I always wish I had when I practiced, and I’m thrilled to see it live on the site.”
The initial version of LegalPad is designed to help lawyers who write commentary about the law online. According to a survey by the American Bar Association, an estimated 10% of attorneys and 27% of law firms have legal blogs, which translates to tens of thousands of attorney bloggers. Blogging can have marked impact on enhancing practice reputation and building referral networks. In fact, 60% of solo practitioners and nearly 40% of law firms report that blogging has resulted in new clients or referrals.
“This could be a gamechanger for attorney collaboration, particularly for information sharing,” said Kate Ferlic, a partner at Egolf + Ferlic + Day in New Mexico. “Casetext provides a platform for lawyers to build reputations in their specialty areas, which for me is civil rights and election law. LegalPad makes sharing legal commentary easy, and the published articles look beautiful. I know they’re reaching the exact audience I want to target in my practice.”
The thing most lawyers appreciate is how easy Casetext makes it to reach the right audience. “Casetext has allowed us to take what we were already doing with our blogs -- unlocking the valuable information we have from our practices -- and connected us with the types of lawyers and other readers we wanted to reach with our ideas,” said Daniel J. O'Rielly, a partner at O'Rielly & Roche LLP in San Francisco. “By regularly sharing our analysis of legal developments, we are positioning ourselves as a ‘go-to’ firm in our practices.”
LegalPad is a web-based writing tool. Like most text editors, users can format text and publish an article for public view. But unique to LegalPad are a number of features built specifically to improve the legal writing experience. Writers can pull up the full text of cases, statutes, and regulations directly alongside the text they are writing, and can seamlessly add quotations to their draft along with the correct citation. Users can bookmark helpful documents while doing research on Casetext’s comprehensive legal database, and later easily reference and add to their draft in the text editor. Casetext has even developed technology to recognize what case an author is writing before they’ve even finished typing it. These are the types of features that make writing about the law orders of magnitude better than traditional tools.
While LegalPad is already a major improvement for people who publish legal analysis, it’s also just the first step in a long-term effort to transform the way people everywhere read, write, and collaborate about the law. Heller notes: “This is just the beginning. We have really exciting things planned for writing legal briefs!”
About Casetext
Casetext is a free legal publishing and research platform that’s quickly becoming the best place to read and write about the law. With over 50,000 registered members and 350,000 monthly users, people sharing insights about the law reach a built-in audience of legal readers, and readers access millions of primary legal documents and relevant analysis contributed by the legal community.
Casetext is working to make all the world’s laws free and understandable while taking on one of the biggest inefficiencies facing the legal market. Founded in 2013, Casetext is a Y Combinator company and earlier this year raised $7 million in Series A funding, led by Union Square Ventures. The company is the brainchild of Jake Heller, a former litigator and president of the Stanford Law Review, honored as Forbes 30 Under 30 for law and policy and Fastcase 50 for legal innovation. For more information, visit http://www.casetext.com. For media inquiries, contact Cari Sommer, Sommer Communications Group, 646-480-7683.
Cari Sommer, Sommer Communications Group, http://www.sommercg.com, 646.480.7683, [email protected]
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