Legal publishers Fastcase and Casemaker today announce their merger and joint building out of legal research and analytics, news, data, and workflow solutions. The two companies will combine their teams and technologies to innovate research, analytics, and workflow offerings that empower lawyers with powerful digital solutions for their clients.
The two companies have taken a similar trajectory in creating an affordable and widely accessible alternative to the global publishers that dominate American law, offering subscriptions to bar associations, who subscribe on behalf of their members. Each company offers its subscribers different products, and this merger allows the combined company to offer state bar associations the best of both, a more complete alternative for legal research.
The companies share a common mission to democratize the law, a mission they intend to pursue even more aggressively as a combined company. In addition, the merger will give the combined company the scale to bring true competition to the legal research, analytics, workflow, and legal information markets as a whole.
“It is clear how much more we can do together for our bar partners and firms,” said Fastcase President and co-founder Phil Rosenthal. “We have long admired what Casemaker has done for bar associations and their members. We have great appreciation for Casemaker’s editorial and production excellence and their deep understanding of the bar market. This merger is the culmination of more than two decades of effort to democratize the law and ensure that every lawyer in America can afford high quality legal research. Combined we can do so much more to address the access to justice crisis.”
Fastcase has pursued a comprehensive product roadmap, with new projects such as its Full Court Press publishing arm, and with strategic acquisition of complementary products such as Docket Alarm in 2018, NextChapter and Law Street Media in 2019, and the technology and team of Judicata in 2020 – products and technology that can now benefit Casemaker subscribers. Casemaker has built out extensive statutory updating, historic nationwide caselaw, a caselaw citator in CaseCheck+, and a leading digest for its state bar associations, all based on editorial excellence that can add real value to Fastcase subscribers.
“We’ve been selective in scaling and we’re so proud to see the Docket Alarm, NextChapter, and now the Judicata team rise as leaders in our organization,” said Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO and co-founder. “These leaders drive our emergence in a market needing more alternatives. With the hard-won editorial and production expertise of Casemaker, we’re now ready to accelerate our climb, rewarding all our bar partners who believed in our companies as strong alternatives.”
More than 1 million lawyers subscribe to Fastcase and Casemaker, and the combined company will continue to support their subscribers and their subscriptions uninterrupted. “The combination of our two programs is long overdue, and now the fun really begins. The first thing we’re going to do, is what we always do, we’re going to put our customers first,” said Casemaker’s owner, Satish Sheth, who becomes a member of Fastcase’s Board of Directors.
