In terms of standalone enhancing software program for authorized professionals, there have been mainly three selections: BriefCatch, WordRake, and PerfectIt. Now that record is one shorter, as BriefCatch has acquired WordRake.
In response to Ross Guberman, founding father of BriefCatch, his firm has acquired WordRake’s core product and expertise belongings. The WordRake product can be built-in into BriefCatch as a part of a single product providing.
Scott Johns, WordRake’s CEO, is becoming a member of BriefCatch as a strategic advisor.
“Everybody’s racing to construct AI writing instruments, however most of them begin from scratch with no actual experience in authorized writing,” Guberman stated in an e mail. “WordRake has 12 patents and over a decade of confirmed enhancing algorithms. We’re thrilled to construct on that substantive basis somewhat than reinvent the wheel with one other chatbot or UI.”
BriefCatch and WordRake are related merchandise in that they every deal with enhancing readability and concision. In contract, PerfectIt is extra of a proofreading software centered on punctuation, capitalization, formatting and the like.
Again in 2018, I examined and in contrast all three of those authorized enhancing packages by having them edit four opinions authored by Supreme Court docket Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, whom Slate as soon as pronounced a terrible writer.
In 2022, I tested BriefCatch again, simply after it got here out with its model 3, however this time utilizing the surreptitiously leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Girls’s Well being Group overturning Roe v. Wade, had, on the time, been subjected to a firestorm of scrutiny and commentary.
I additionally tested WordRake again in 2022, after it launched what was then its newest model. I first tested WordRake way back in 2012, shortly after it was launched.
Final 12 months, BriefCatch released a new version 4 that added two new options that use generative AI to reinforce authorized doc preparation: AI-driven Bluebook quotation correction and a context-aware writing advisor.
In December, BriefCatch raised a $6 million Series A funding round particularly meant to help enlargement of its AI merchandise and focused acquisitions.
“This funding lets us speed up two issues directly: disciplined acquisitions and deeper product improvement,” Guberman advised me on the time. “Our objective is to provide attorneys and judges a single, built-in AI platform for elite authorized writing and enhancing, and we’re already constructing capabilities that leap previous what present enhancing instruments — or generic genAI — can do as we speak.”
WordRake was initially developed by Gary Kinder, a lawyer and author whose 1998 guide, Ship Of Gold In The Deep Blue Sea, went to quantity seven on The New York Occasions bestseller record.
WordRake has 12 patents on automated enhancing software program, all of which is able to now be transferred to BriefCatch.
“I first heard Gary Kinder converse once I was a summer time affiliate,” Guberman advised me. “His method to enhancing modified how I assumed concerning the craft. Bringing WordRake into BriefCatch a long time later looks like the right subsequent chapter for us and for legal-writing tech.”
