Casetext empowers lawyers to better serve their clients through advanced information services backed by cutting edge technology and expert analysis from the legal community. Its focus is on improving legal research and has made accessing case, statutory, and regulatory law free since it launched in 2013.
Casetext Highlights
Meet CARA. The Case Analysis Research Assistant, or CARA, is Casetext’s AI-backed legal research tool that helps you discover relevant cases and briefs based on complaints, briefs, and memos that you upload to CARA. After you upload your brief, CARA will analyze the brief and make all subsequent research more intelligent, instantly returning relevant cases that are on the same facts, legal issues, jurisdiction, and motion at issue. It will also surface relevant statutes, articles, and briefs filed by other attorneys on the same topic. This means that you don’t have to doubt if you missed anything after you already spent countless hours on research.
Comprehensive Research. Casetext’s database coverage is impressive, including a long list of primary source law at the state and federal level. Casetext also includes briefs (federal only for now), over 700,000 articles from attorneys and law firms, and proprietary databases of case holdings and “black letter law” snippets that state well-settled law ready to add to your brief for that extra “pow!”
Fast, clean, and easy. Researching on Casetext is fast (like, Google-fast), the design is streamlined and uncluttered, and its functionality is easy to use and natural. It’s very intuitive, and no training or learning is required to master it. Spend less time researching and more time writing your brief, building your business, or spending some time on yourself.
Free to use. Casetext has made access to its case, statutory, and regulatory law free ever since it launched in 2013. If you’re interested in its premium research features or in using CARA, you will need subscription access for those services.
Casetext Pricing
There are 3 pricing tiers:
The Basic tier is a free-to-use package, which allows for unlimited searching and reading cases and statutes.
The Individual tier is $65/user/month if billed annually, and $89/user/month if billed month-to-month. This tier gives you access to CARA and the databases of briefs, legal holdings, citing cases, and black letter law.
The Law Firm tier varies in price depending on the size and needs of your firm and includes everything the individual package offers.
Casetext Features
| Casetext | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Website | casetext.com | ||
| Plans | Basic | Individual | Law Firm |
| Starting Price | Free | $65/mo annually; $89/mo monthly | Varies |
| Apps | |||
| Free Trial | 14-Day Free Trial | 14-Day Free Trial | |
| Cases | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| State Statutes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Secondary Sources | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dockets | |||
| Citation Checking | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Natural Language Searching | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Boolean Searching | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Filter Searching | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Research History | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Folders | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Additional Results | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Alerts | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Case Summaries | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Formatted Downloads | ✓ | ✓ | |
| News Coverage | |||
| Search without an Account | ✓ | ||
| Send to Cloud Storage |
Things You Might Want to Know
More information about CARA. Uploading your briefs onto a third-party website may sound sketchy, but Casetext is committed to security and confidentiality of anything uploaded to CARA. It encrypts all uploaded briefs and deletes those briefs as soon as they are processed. CARA has already passed stringent reviews at some of the biggest, and most security paranoid, firms in the country. As always, you’ll want to review their privacy policy and terms of use to make sure you understand the nuances. One more thing: at the moment, CARA only works with PDFs (both with selectable text and those that need to be OCR’d), Microsoft Word documents, and plain text documents. Sorry Pages folks.
Quick search. Many legal research databases feel cumbersome with long page-load times. With Casetext’s underlying code, results feel more like a Google search, showing up almost instantaneously and feeling relevant to your work, which saves you time and energy.
Proprietary databases. Casetext features proprietary databases. For example, the “black letter law” database is perfect for unearthing that one perfect snippet that will drive your argument home.
Who Casetext is For
Honestly, Casetext is an excellent option for everyone from solos to larger law firms. Since its basic product is free to use, why not try it out to see if it’s a good fit for you? If you want to give the premium features or CARA a test run, sign up for a 14-day free trial. While Casetext may not offer comprehensive secondary source databases on par with its bigger competitors, it’s still a great service worth spending your time to explore.
See all the key features of all the online legal research tools options in our features chart.
They don't discriminate against alleged "non-lawyers"
Out of all of these “exclusive” AI sites, CaseText is the only one that understands that you don’t have to have a bar card to be a lawyer. In fact, the SCOTUS has affirmed this fact multiple times. Other company’s just don’t get that. With the rise of pro se litigants these days, one would think that SOMEONE would catch on, but no….
I wish CaseText had as robust tools as Westlaw, but Westlaw is an ABSOLUTE joke.
Did you find this review helpful? Yes (1) No