Launching CaseMark: Igniting a New Era of AI-Powered Legal Solutions
AI is hands down the most transformational, disruptive technology we have seen in the last 20 years. This feels like what happened with Web 2.0 or the launch of the iPhone, only significantly bigger. There are still so many industries that haven’t fully embraced technology in general and AI is going to be a forcing function ushering in so many opportunities. I like to borrow from Scott Galloway (Prof G) and say that it’s not AI that is going to steal your job, it’s someone who learns how to use AI that will.
When we started Urban Airship WAY back in the day (it’s been 14 years … my lord) we knew we were onto something. The more we built we realized how much more there was needed. Our customers loved what were building but it was always, “Great! Now can you make it do X, Y and Z?” That is one of those moments when you know you’re kickstarting the product/market fit with your customers as the ones helping you guide the roadmap. Push was just the start of something that became foundational for customer 360 across all communications channels. It seems so obvious now.
AI is no different. Logistics, customer service, legal, finance, etc. All of these industries will be significantly disrupted in the coming years. This transition is going to happen much faster than before; we’re not building from scratch this go around and the fact that AI recursively makes us faster at what we do.
Capital allocators are already struggling with the implications around fundraising; how much money do you need to put into a company when you have AI at your back?
The impact of AI is beyond just what it means for building product quickly. Capital allocators are already struggling with the implications around fundraising; how much money do you need to put into a company when you have AI at your back? Boot strapping our next company and getting to cash flow positive is our #1 goal and doing it with the most efficient team possible. Not only are we navigating a whole new range of potential challenges building a product for the legal profession, something tells me a lot of the rules around startups have already changed.
We were able to succeed with Urban Airship only because we had the right timing; nobody else had a working solution for the first 90 days of push being available and we basically sucked the air out of the room. Over the last decade, I drank a little too much of my own Koolaid and thought that I was some kind of brilliant entrepreneur able to build a company out of anything I got involved with. Turns out building a successful company requires 3 things; team, tech and timing. My last few forays have had great teams and tech but the timing was not the best.
This go around we’ve got the team-tech-timing trifecta in place.
We’re calling our new company CaseMark.
CaseMark — AI for Legal
I saw firsthand how powerful AI could be when my wife, a partner at her insurance defense firm, challenged me to draft a motion using ChatGPT. The results? Amazingly accurate and contextually aware when done correctly. But, AI is not without its limitations and is not yet the silver bullet people are claiming it is.
I could see the ah-ha moment and she wasn’t the last one in the legal profession I was able to do this parlor trick with. But big deal. ChatGPT owns the market, right? Welp, nope. Turns out ChatGPT is a mile wide and an inch deep and when it doesn’t know something it just makes it up. It’s called a hallucination. And when it does it wowzers does it go all in on it. AI is very confidently wrong, especially when making up new case law.
We also knew the timing was right when Facebook released some of their models as open source and the Google memo on AI leaked. The gist was that there was not going to be some singular Google-like source of truth for these LLMs. It’s going to be a whole universe of solutions weaved together to deliver interesting, compelling and (most importantly) correct answers. This is where the there-there in AI is going to be. I am 100% right on this.
We’re launching CaseMark based on two simple premises; build tools where attorneys already do their work and leverage AI to help them do what they do, only faster. We’re launching the first product in our suite today called Workflow which is our Chrome Extension coupled with our soon-to-be released Microsoft Word Addin. We’d like nothing more than to quietly be that secret weapon for every attorney and paralegal without having to change anything about how they research on the web or draft their documents.
Later this Fall we’ll be launching a series of complementary products based on our own custom LLMs that help streamline legal discovery and securely automate time consuming summaries like medical chronologies and demand packages. Our initial forays into this have been mind bogglingly efficient.
We’re not trying to save lawyers time; the legal profession lives and dies by the billable hour. Instead, we’re focusing our efforts on early-career attorneys, increasing capacity for law firms that are looking to take on their competitors and corporate/insurance firms that have a P&L they need to manage.
We are so excited about what we’re building here.
The best really is yet to come.
