Robert Ambrogi Blog
In what appears to be a first-of-its kind member benefit, the Kentucky Bar Association has entered into an affiliation with two legal research companies, Casemaker and vLex, to offer its members free access to both platforms, plus access to vLex’s artificial intelligence research assistant, Vincent.
While virtually every state bar offers its members access to a legal research service — typically either Casemaker or Fastcase — this offer appears to be unique in offering access to two distinct services plus an AI tool.
As I reported in 2017, Casemaker and vLex already had joint licensing agreements in place by which Casemaker provide its U.S. content to vLex to supplement its international legal research collection. Through that agreement, Casemaker’s customers have the ability to search international materials from vLex.
And last year, the two companies expanded that partnership to give Casemaker’s customers reduced-price access to Vincent, the vLex AI research assistant, directly through the Casemaker platform.
Meanwhile, vLex, which says it has the largest global collection of legal information, last month rolled out its new vLex Justis platform, combining its own materials with those from the U.K. legal research service Justis, which it acquired in March 2019.
The KBA was already providing its members with free access to Casemaker. But in renewing that agreement, the KBA and Casemaker expanded their affiliation to include member access to Vincent and vLex.
That means that KBA members may now access Vincent from the Casemaker4 platform, or if they prefer, from the vLex Justis platform, both directly from the KBA website.
In addition, KBA members can search U.S. law either through Casemaker or through vLex. While their collections of primary legal materials are the same, vLex also has blog posts and articles from LexBlog, JD Supra, Mondaq and various journals.
As I explained in a previous post, Vincent is in the same vein as CARA from Casetext, Clerk from Judicata, and EVA from ROSS Intelligence in that you upload a brief, legal document or court opinion, and it analyzes the document and uses the document’s language and citations to find related cases, statutes, books, journal articles, contract models, and more.
Vincent is built on Iceberg, an AI platform for massive content projects that vLex initially developed to facilitate its own publishing of legal materials.
Vincent is unique among AI-driven legal research tools for its ability to simultaneously analyze documents in two languages, English and Spanish, as well as across multiple jurisdictions, licensed databases such as Casemaker, and a firm’s internal knowledge management resources.
“We are thrilled to continue our valued relationship with Casemaker, and now to build upon that by offering cutting-edge AI capabilities to our members,” said John Meyers, KBA executive director, in a statement. “For smaller firms, in particular, this will be a great equalizer, enabling them to tap into technology previously only available to the very largest firms in the country.”