At this point, most people in the legal realm are at least passingly familiar with Casetext’s CARA brief-analyzing tool (or one of its competitors- i.e., Bloomberg’s Brief Analyzer, Westlaw Edge QuickCheck). This tool (and those like it) allow you to upload a brief (in PDF or Word document form) and then the tool will analyze it to check if you have missed any relevant cases. For a little refresher on that experience, check out this blog post by a law student here.

Casetext is remaining at the forefront of the legal technology realm by unveiling its newest tool earlier this year: Casetext Compose. 

Compose is a new tool that helps draft briefs for you. Its creator (and Casetext’s CEO) Jake Heller calls it “a breakthrough that will have a profound impact on the practice of law.” It is the first product of its kind (although if CARA is anything to go by, other legal research companies will soon be scrambling to create their own brief-drafting tools). 

Here is an excellent article which describes what Compose can-- and cannot-- do. 

There are quite a few videos embedded in Casetext’s Compose website that will show you exactly how the tool will function step-by-step.

As with other new legal tech tools, Compose will not replace the ingenuity and creativity of lawyers- as always, we’ll still need human lawyers for that. Compose is just another tool that will help lawyers to do tasks that are repetitive and time-intensive, freeing them up to do the things that algorithms and computers can’t. 

Submitted by Emma E Babler on March 11, 2020

This article appears in the categories: Law Library

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