vLex and Fastcase, two of the largest, fastest-growing legal technology companies, announced that they are merging to form the world’s largest law firm subscriber base with more than one billion legal documents from more than 100 countries. As part of the merger, Oakley Capital and Bain Capital Credit are investing in the combined business to expand its global reach and accelerate the company’s legal artificial intelligence (AI) lab, which develops AI tools that streamline research, tracking, writing, and filing documents for the legal industry.
The new combined entity will be called vLex Group, and its products will retain the name of vLex in global markets and Fastcase in the U.S. The company, which has offices in the United States, Europe, the U.K., Asia, and Latin America, will combine management teams and invest in unified global products based on the complementary strengths of both firms. It will maintain headquarters offices in Washington, D.C., Miami, and Barcelona.
The new company will reach the majority of lawyers in the U.S. (~1.1 million subscribers out of 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S.) in partnership with state bar associations and include legal materials from more than 100 countries around the world.
The combined library contains over one billion legal documents, including judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, court rules, docket sheets, briefs, pleadings, motions, authored treatises, and legal news articles.
News of the merger comes when competing large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Bard, create a more competitive market for generative AI.
“With the rapid proliferation of LLM models, we are in a new era where content is king,” said Fastcase CEO Ed Walters. “With the merger of vLex and Fastcase, nobody has a more extensive global law library than we do. This is the biggest legal data corpus ever assembled, including highly valuable structured data with industry-standard tags and analytics. The combined library is the crown jewel of LLMs and the ultimate training data set for legal AI.”
The companies are not newcomers to legal AI. vLex created one of the first AI assistants for legal research, called Vincent. It has long used an internal AI tool called Iceberg to generate structure in its own data and for law firms. Fastcase’s Docket Alarm product is one of the first legal tech companies to integrate OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, and both Fastcase and Docket Alarm use AI to create structure and tags in legal documents. The companies will use their combined financial strength to accelerate growth and to invest more in the frontiers of artificial intelligence in law.