Yesterday afternoon, I had the chance to sit down for about 20 minutes via Zoom with Jake Heller, the founder and CEO of Casetext, to discuss his company’s acquisition by Thomson Reuters in a $650 million cash deal.
What follows is a transcript of our conversation, which I have condensed and edited very slightly for style and continuity.
References to the morning investors’ call are to yesterday morning’s briefing by Thomson Reuters to its institutional investors, which I wrote about here.
A Stanford Law School graduate, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review, Heller founded Casetext in 2013 after stints clerking for 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boudin and as an associate at law firm Ropes & Gray.
AMBROGI: Jake, thanks for taking a few minutes. And, again, congratulations. As you know, I’ve followed you guys from the start, and so I’m really excited for all of you on a personal level. But I’m curious about your motivation for entering into this deal. Obviously, you’ve put a lot of blood and sweat into building up this company. On the investor call this morning, the Thomson Reuters executives talked about the strategy behind why they wanted to do the deal. What about from your perspective: Why did you want to do the deal? I’m sure $650 million was a big motivator, but knowing how much you’ve put into the company, I doubt that’s all there is to it.
HELLER: That’s right. We wouldn’t have done anything like this if we didn’t know that it wouldn’t be a good deal not just for the shareholders and the employees, but also for the customers. What really got me excited about this was all the possibilities of what we’re going to build together with our customers.
For one, the number one constraint that we have right now is content. On one hand, we know that providing West’s and Thomson Reuters’ world-class content database behind our legal research capability is going to make that dramatically better, including when CoCounsel does legal research activities for you. Having it do that on Thomson Reuters’ content is going to be an immediate benefit to our customers.
But, working with their content, there is much more that we can do. For example, using Practical Law’s content to make drafting automation tools – tools that are already there in the pipeline for us – just dramatically better. And really, that’s just where it starts. We saw an immediately huge gain for our customers just by working with them on this. And what’s even more exciting to me is it’s clear that TR is going to invest very substantially in this type of AI. They’re taking it as seriously as we are, have the resources to accelerate our development in a way that, working separately, neither of us would be able to accomplish in the same way as we could working together.
Read full interview at
