I search for emerging companies, technologies, disruptive technologies, innovations, start-ups and up-starts. I’ll look to match potential problems… e.g. “plastic pollution” to solutions… e.g. 3D Printer for recycled plastic waste…for potential venture capitalists, angel investors, and online funders. I’ll also highlight a variety of topics including funding success stories, the environment, housing, medical, artificial intelligence, science, aging populations, disabled populations, social entrepreneurs, philanthropy, and topical news. I’m always searching for great people innovating, inventing, and doing, great things.
I don’t endorse. Only disseminate.
The 411: Successfully Funded and in the Marketplace - Making all the world's laws free and understandable
Found on: - https://wefunder.com/casetext (and)
https://casetext.com/
What we do: Casetext democratizes the wealth of legal information by creating a crowdsourced platform for researching legal documents. Created by former Presidents of the Stanford and Harvard Law Reviews, the free platform opens access to legal information by providing annotations from experts across the field.
Why it's a big deal: Law firms collectively spend billions of dollars every year on commercial legal research databases. Despite the fact that the information is law--which, of course, is public domain-- law firms will shell out this money for services that provide advanced search tools and value-added content on top of the law. These services save lawyers their time, and thus their money.
Casetext is completely disrupting this market by offering a crowdsourced annotation platform for legal research--for free. With 250,000 visitors every month and over 100,000 posts from 35,000 users, Casetext is capitalizing on the massive demand for a service that saves legal researchers' time and money.
WF: Why did you pick this idea?
C: Jake’s frustration with free legal research led him to code a browser extension for himself that replicated some of Westlaw’s functionality in Google Scholar. He realized that such a tool had a market when his firm told attorneys to use Westlaw less to cut costs, but the attorneys never did because there were no good cheap alternatives.
As lawyers, we know what features are important, and what’s missing. As law review presidents, we made connections to law professors and colleagues who will be key contributors to the community. And as coders, we know that what we want to achieve is doable. Our unique background makes us singularly qualified to solve this problem.
WF: What's new about what you're making?
C: Law firms currently pay for extremely expensive tools (Westlaw and Lexis) that hire thousands of employees to generate content (much like Encarta and Britannica used to do). Free or cheap tools often display only the text of the case, missing key functionality that lawyers rely on to do their jobs.
Instead of paying thousands of attorneys to aggregate and create information, we use automation and crowdsourcing. Our automated aggregation includes sources that commercial tools ignore. Our crowdsourcing harnesses widespread discontent with Westlaw and Lexis into something productive. And our platform encourages lawyers to share comments or engage in discussions alongside the case text--a feature exclusive to Casetext.
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