As many of you that follow 3 Geeks know, I’m a big fan of the products that are coming out of Stanford University’s CODEX program. One of the latest insights comes from a CODEX fellow, Casetext, with their new CARA platform. Casetext’s VP of Legal Research, Pablo Arredondo, has been talking with me about CARA for a number of months now, and I’ve seen a few versions as he prepped CARA for release. If you’ve ever seen Pablo demo this new product, then you know how excited he is about the value that he believes this brings to legal research.

What is CARA? CARA is a ‘brief-as-query’ legal research tool, in which instead of using a keyword query you drop an entire brief in as the input. Users can input a brief in either Word or PDF format. From my use of it, I would explain CARA as a tool to analyse your brief (or the other side’s brief) to find potential missing points of law, or alternative arguments not cited within the brief.

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CARA data mines the inputted brief and uses the gathered information to form a sort of ‘mega-query’ that runs against Casetext’s database of case law. CARA takes a look at the brief and analyzes how much cited cases are discussed within the brief as well as the other text within the brief. Arredondo explained to me that “[t]he analysis CARA runs looks not only at direct citation relationships (Case A cites to Case B) but also ‘soft citation’ relationships – Case A doesn’t cite Case B directly, but Case C cites to both A and B.” He also says that, “CARA also discounts heavily cited procedural cases like Celotex” so that these citations do not skew the results. Attorneys and researchers upload their drafts to check for missing cases before filing and uploading their briefs, and they check their opponent’s briefs to see if there are missing cases that they might be able to exploit.