Casetext pioneered AI-powered legal research and ultimately built CoCounsel, the first major GPT-4 powered legal assistant deployed to practicing attorneys. Founded in 2013 by Jake Heller, Laura Safdie, and Pablo Arredondo, the company spent a decade indexing case law, statutes, and regulations across all U.S. jurisdictions before pivoting decisively into generative AI in 2022 when OpenAI gave them early GPT-4 access. The core problem Casetext solved was the soul-crushing inefficiency of legal work: associates spending dozens of hours reviewing documents, drafting memos, and chasing precedent that an AI trained on legal reasoning could compress into minutes.
CoCounsel performs document review, deposition preparation, contract analysis, legal research memos, summarization, and database querying with attorney-grade citations grounded in Casetext's proprietary case law corpus. The original Casetext platform also offered CARA A.I., a brief analyzer that compared filings against the case law database, plus SmartCite and Compose for litigation drafting. The product is built around verified outputs, citation linking, and confidentiality safeguards required by bar associations.
Casetext raised roughly $64M across its lifetime from Union Square Ventures, Canvas Ventures, and 8VC. In August 2023, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650M in cash, one of the largest legal tech exits ever and a landmark generative AI acquisition. CoCounsel has since been integrated across Thomson Reuters Westlaw and Practical Law products. Today CoCounsel Core and CoCounsel Drafting are sold to law firms, in-house legal teams, and corporate counsel worldwide.