Everyone talks about “AI” or “machine learning” or any one of the numerous euphemisms for artificial-intelligence solutions. The language around the technology has softened from the height of its hype cycle, but there’s still a sense out there that AI is this “thing.” As one legal tech leader put it to me last year, “a lot of lawyers act like ‘we need to get some AI’ without trying to figure out how AI solutions might be different.”
To some extent, that still holds sway. It’s a conclusion that’s not entirely off base because some solutions use the same underlying AI algorithms. Still, even in those cases, the work that goes into building something atop that foundation matters. And when providers have wholly distinct code under the hood, the differences really matter.
Unfortunately, the legal sector doesn’t really have its own Consumer Reports — a bunch of folks running around pressure testing legal tech day in and day out. So when the National Legal Research Group set up a study comparing Casetext’s CARA AI against LexisNexis to determine which system provides users with the fastest, best results, it filled an important gap in the sector.
Casetext, who would never shy away from head-to-head matchups, emerged victorious with the NLRG finding that attorneys complete their research 24.5 percent faster using Casetext CARA AI compared to LexisNexis — requiring on average 4.4 times fewer searches on CARA to get the right results. That may not sound like much, but the study figured that these time savings add up to between 132 to 210 hours a year — a number they arrived at based on ABA figures on the amount of legal research attorneys do every year.
And CARA wasn’t just faster. According to the report, the attorneys studied rated CARA’s results 20.8 percent more relevant than those they found through LexisNexis.
Casetext’s Jake Heller told me of the study that the real winners for his product are the small law firms and solo practitioners. “If you’re small, you have to find ways to make your job faster or you won’t have time to run your practice.” Picking up an extra 200 hours a year would seem like a pretty good exchange.
While these showdowns may seem antagonistic, they really aren’t. Figuring out where products perform in relation to each other is critically important to driving the next generation of updates. LexisNexis isn’t going to take these results lightly and they are undoubtedly already working on improving their system. Too bad we don’t see more comparisons like this.
Head-To-Head Showdown Between AI-Driven Legal Research Tools curated from Above the Law
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