Startup Snapshot: Pablo Arredondo

This is the first in a series of profiles of the people behind active startups. (I start with a fellow fellow) If you are interested in sharing your experiences, or want to suggest a question to add, ping me at mbay@stanford.edu.

Pablo Arredondo
Pablo Arredondo

PABLO ARREDONDO

411: Vice president, legal research, at Casetext, which launched in the summer of 2013. CodeX Fellow.
Age: 36. Web: www.casetext.com. Twitter: @tweetatpablo

Schools: University of California Berkeley undergrad (class of 2001), Stanford Law (class of 2005).

Your role at CodeX: My research focuses on isolating and leveraging patterns in judicial opinions. Two patterns I have leveraged to date are explanatory parentheticals and the phrase “It is well settled…” In 2013, I created a prototype based on the efforts that can be found at www.wellsettled.com. The research continues in collaboration with my CodeX colleague Mark Bowman.

Is Casetext your first start-up? No, in 2010 I co-founded a start-up called Occam. The idea behind Occam was a legal research engine that allowed attorneys to upload digitized litigation records and then provided matter-specific ranking of search results. We were able to raise a seed round, but unfortunately the company did not reach a Series A. It was one of the exhilarating experiences of my life, and it is too painful to talk about. Startups can be like that.

What does Casetext do? What problem does it solve? Casetext is building a free legal research platform where primary materials are linked to useful secondary analysis. Casetext is looking to solve the problem that most sophisticated legal research platforms are exorbitant, and current free legal research platforms lack useful secondary analysis.

Casetext has built a full-fledged legal research engine and developed technology that lets us integrate thousands of legal blogs, law firm client alerts and legal briefs. We have also built a new writing tool, LegalPad, that is built especially for writing about the law. Casetext currently has over 10,000 visitors a day.

Do you have funding? Yes. Casetext has gone through two rounds of fund raising. Casetext was incubated at Y-Combinator. After emerging from Y-Combinator, we raised a seed round of $1.8 million dollars. Earlier this year we raised a $7M Series A round led by Union Square Ventures. USV has funded a number of community-oriented start-ups, including Twitter, Etsy, and Stack Overflow. At some point in the future we will raise a Series B.

Your biggest challenge re: the startup: There are challenges that are common to legal startups: convincing attorneys to try new technology and obtaining primary legal materials in suitable format are two big ones. As a community-driven platform, Casetext also faces the challenge of creating incentives for our community to stay engaged with the platform. This challenge has both a technical and outreach component. If you look at other successful community platforms like Stack Overflow and Reddit, you will see that they have developed a range of tools to incentivize users.

What do you need right now? In 6 months? In a year? The present and near future for us is focused on building a happy, engaged community while at the same time improving both the research and writing tools on our platform. We recently had dozens of great posts about the recent Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage and Obamacare. One of our main goals is to get the same level of analysis and engagement for other important decisions.

What’s next? We just launched LegalPad, a new writing platform designed from the ground up for, and only for, people writing about law. LegalPad lets you seamlessly access and integrate text from primary legal documents like cases and statutes. LegalPad aims to make the process of creating written commentary on case law joyful. We want it to become the tool that all legal bloggers use to create and publish their analysis.

What have you learned that you wish you had known 5 years ago? I have learned many things since “taking the plunge” into the startup world. One thing I wish I had learned much earlier was how to do basic coding: how to write a Python script that uses regular expressions to data-mine text, how to use MySQL to create a searchable database, and how to use Twitter Bootstrap to create basic user interfaces. I am still very much a ‘newbie’ when it comes to coding, but even rudimentary skills will let you prototype ideas.

Carl Friddle
Carl Friddle

Who influenced you the most? One of the big influences in my life happened during my undergraduate years at Berkeley. I was fortunate to get a job as a lab assistant at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Human Genome Center. This was during the heyday of the Human Genome Project. I had the opportunity to work under leading genomicists who came to Berkeley from all over the world. Their dedication and ambition was inspirational. I am particularly indebted to a geneticist named Carl Friddle.

Ed Walters
Ed Walters

I have met many great people in the field of legal informatics. The work of Edward “Ed” Walters, CEO of Fastcase, has been inspirational. His BadLawBot is a great example of how patterns in judicial opinions can be leveraged.It datamines judicial opinions to extract citator entries, allowing users to see where courts have noted strong negative treatment (e.g., reversed, vacated or overruled).

Jake Heller
Jake Heller

Jake Heller, our co-founder and CEO, has been another huge influence. My early work focused on leveraging the information contained within legal documents; Jake showed me how powerful it can be to leverage the information contained within the brains of lawyers themselves. Working with Jake, I have come to appreciate that there is much more to legal research than discovering the right case—you need to understand the context surrounding the case and for that there is no substitute for human wisdom.

Paul Lomio
Paul Lomio

Paul Lomio, Stanford Law School’s Library Director, was a source of invaluable guidance and encouragement from the moment I got into the field of legal informatics. He made a huge difference for me, as he did for so many others. (He passed away in March.)

 

What book changed your life? I attended an event where Alex Kozinski, who served as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 2007 to 2014, discussed copyright law. He said something I really liked: “When you read a good book, it changes who you are.” So I think all of the good books I have read have changed my life to varying degrees.

Richad Dawkins' The Selfish Gene

I found Richard Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene” on my mother’s bookshelf during my freshman year of high school. I loved how much it annoyed my parents when I echoed Dawkin’s gene-centric thesis, particularly when I did so to excuse any alleged misbehavior on my part. That book got me interested in genetics, which got me interested in bioethics, we got me interested in law, and here I am.

In 2009 my step-father gave me a copy of Charles Seife’s “Decoding the Universe.” Now that I think about it, a few months after reading that book I started pursuing legal informatics. That may not be entirely a coincidence.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs? Breathe.

Where do you want to be in 5 years? 10 years? Next week? There is so much work to do in the field of legal informatics, and time flies when you are doing what you love. So 10 years is just around the corner. But if things go as I hope, a decade from now lawyers will be able to competently research and write a brief without spending a dime on technology. Moreover, the legal research and writing process will be at once more robust and more efficient than is possible with current tools. Personally, and this may sound obnoxious, but 10 years from now I want to be doing pretty much what I am doing now, though hopefully I will be much better at it.

Favorite vacation destination: New York City

Favorite musican: I don’t have one favorite. Prince in concert is something to see; that man runs a tight ship.

Winston Churchill (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

Favorite quote: “If you are going through hell, keep going.”— attributed to Winston Churchill.

Your mantra: Nothing fancy. Om mani padme om.

What didn’t I ask you? Hobbies: Basketball and chess.

Who would you want to be with if you got stuck on the NYC 4 train or on the tarmac in a 737 for 3 hours? Assuming my better half is not an option, Stephen Colbert.

Compiled by Monica Bay, a Fellow at Stanford and member of the California bar.