Fastcase and Chill
| Author | Rich Acello |
| Pages | 34-35 |
34 || ABA JOURNAL APRIL 2018
Business of Law
PHOTOGRAPH BY ARNOLD ADLER
Fastcase and Chill
Inspired by Netflix, the legal research service is creating its own content
by relying on an old, possibly outdated model By Rich Acello
AS ANYONE IN
PUBLISHING will
tell you, print is out
and digital is where
all the action is.
Of course, another wel l-known
adage is “What ’s old is new aga in.”
That seems to be the one that lega l
research provider Fas tcase relied on
when it decided to launch its late st
venture.
In January, Fastcase, wh ich serves
more than 800,000 subscriber s,
launched RAI L: The Journal of
Robotics and Art ificial Intelligence
& Law—a print publication avail able
via subscription. The jour nal, which
features law rev iew-style articles and
commentary f rom experts in the legal
tech field, will b e published six times
per year and be the flagsh ip publica-
tion for Fastcase’s new publishing
arm, Full Cou rt Press.
According to Fastc ase CEO Ed
Walters, the “back to t he future”
venture is an example of bei ng
somewhere others aren’t. “We’ve
always been zigg ing when everyone
zags,” says Walters, who decided to
launch R AIL because he and other s
at Fastcase were inter ested in the
topic and because he tea ches a law
of robots course at the G eorgetown
University Law Center.
The company also was in spired by
a 2009 article by Malcol m Gladwell,
“How David Beats Goliath.” Walters
says, “It’s the story of a basketba ll
coach who couldn’t teac h his players
to jump higher, so he taught them
how to do a full-cour t press defense
on every inbound. When he wa s
accused of cheati ng, he said, ‘I’m
just not playing your game.’ ”
Walters also points to Net flix as
an inspiration. “W hile Netflix starte d
out as an aggrega tor of movies, they
said over the long term we’re going
to create our own or iginal content,”
Walters says. Like Netfli x pre-House
of Cards, Walters found that user s had
to rely on other servic es when they hit
the limit of what Fastca se provided.
“There are more than a m illion
searches on Fastca se every week,”
Walters says. “But when lawyers
need expert com mentary about the
law, they need to stop using Fastca se
and go somewhere else. For the future ,
we needed to make the Net flix kind of
move, and that’s where Full Cour t Press
comes from. We will be our ow n pub-
lisher with our own c ontent. We know
what people are search ing for, so we can
publish treatises ta rgeted to people’s
interest. We can mar ry our catalog
to their searches.”
RAIL W AYS
How much of Fastcase’s audience will
be tempted by the chance t o curl up with
a journal about robotic s and AI? “I don’t
know what the readership for R AIL wil l
be,” Walters says. “We don’t want to be
like every other jour nal in the world—
we want to do it dierently.”
Among the book lovers at Fastca se
is Steve Errick , chief operating ocer.
“I was at a tech conference r ecently,
and everyone was say ing there’s not
a lot being written ab out artificial
intelligence,” says Erric k, former
managing dir ector of research
Ed Walters, CEO at Fastcase: “We don’t want to be like every other journal in the world.”
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