On January 5, 2021 FastCase and Casemaker announced a merger. FastCase and Casemaker provide a cost-effective alternative to other legal research databases. According to the CEO of FastCase, Bar associations in all 50 states provide FastCase or Casemaker at no or low cost, so the merger creates the largest lawyer subscriber base of any legal research database.

Although the merger was announced 2 months ago, the two companies still provide two separate databases. Since the announcement, the companies are working on ways to combine their resources to provide the best service to their customers. The first half of the year will be spent examining the two products and deciding how best to merge the existing platforms. Both companies bring different strengths to the merger.

In the last few years, FastCase acquired several companies that strengthened and broadened its services, including Docket Alarm, Next Chapter, Law Street Media, and Judicata. Docket Alarm provides docket tracking and litigation analytics. Next Chapter is a practice software that provides attorneys with assistance preparing, managing, and filing bankruptcy cases. Law Street Media is a legal news service. Judicata is another legal research service that provides advanced legal search tools for researching and analyzing California law. FastCase is working to expand that technology to their much larger database. In addition to its various acquisitions, FastCase has developed a publishing arm under the name Full Court Press, to provide practice guides and other secondary sources.

Casemaker is known for its continuous updating of state codes, and regulations. They also provide support products, such as CaseDigest, CaseCheck+, and CasemakerLibra. CaseDigest provides summaries of Federal and State case law, produced by attorney editors. CaseCheck+ is a citator that provides users with information about negative treatment of case law. CasemakerLibra provides a library of secondary sources, published by CaseMaker.

Anticipating the benefits of combining the best of both platforms, it is possible that the FastCase-Casemaker merger will create a robust and substantial low-cost alternative to other legal research databases.

From the Fastcase blog: “Our annotations are different because they are not restrained by the editorial conventions associated with physical documents, meaning they can rapidly be manipulated to turn up the most valuable information… Fastcase’s annotations are not notes, summaries, or editorial claims about how courts have treated your statute. Rather, Fastcase shows you highly-relevant common law source material – what judges have actually written about a particular law.” Read more about it here – http://www.fastcase.com/modern-annotations/