FILE PHOTO: A gavel is seen on legal books in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 14, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly
(Reuters) - As artificial intelligence pushes deeper into the legal industry, Fastcase and vLex are merging in a deal the legal research companies said Tuesday will speed up the creation of AI tools for lawyers.
London-based private equity firm Oakley Capital and Bain Capital Credit, part of global investment firm Bain Capital, are investing an undisclosed amount into the combined company, which will be named vLex Group.
"AI is absolutely a motivator for the combination," Fastcase CEO Ed Walters said.
With large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Bard quickly increasing their power and reach, vLex and Fastcase are betting their combined document library will be a rich training data set for legal AI products.
"It will always make sense to train legal LLMs on legal data instead of the World Wide Web," Walters said.
The merger creates a law library that is "the biggest legal data corpus ever assembled," the companies said. The new company will have more than one billion legal documents from more than 100 countries, including judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, briefs, pleadings and legal news articles, they said.
The combined company will license the dataset to other entities for use in creating their own large language models, Walters said.
The combined company will also build its own products trained on the legal data, he said.
Generative AI has fueled a new tech gold rush since OpenAI's November debut of ChatGPT. Legal tech companies have joined in the frenzy and are already deploying new products for law firms and corporate legal teams.
Lawyers at global law firm Allen & Overy and accounting and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers are starting to use an AI platform from a startup named Harvey, which received funding from OpenAI's investment fund. Other large law firms are using new products from companies like Casetext, a legal research company that last month released a new generative AI legal assistant product.
The new vLex Group will have headquarters in Washington, D.C., Miami and Barcelona. The products will keep the vLex name in global markets and the Fastcase name in the United States, reaching about 1.1 million U.S. lawyers, according to Tuesday's announcement.
Spokespeople for Bain Capital and Oakley Capital, which acquired a majority stake in vLex in September, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Casey Flaherty of legal innovation collective LexFusion predicted the new vLex would be a "serious player" among legal information companies as AI progresses. "The agglomeration of valuable legal and regulatory data is what makes this merger so potentially impactful," he said in an email.
Read more:
PwC's 4,000 legal staffers get AI assistant as law chatbots gain steam
Bar exam score shows AI can keep up with 'human lawyers,' researchers say
