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Even free legal research platforms need to make money at some point, and so as Descrybe.ai today launches a paid upgrade, it is making it worth your while, offering a “Legal Research Toolkit” with a suite of features, including its own AI-driven citator, which it calls the Cytator.
As I wrote about Descrybe last year, it was founded by a Boston-area husband and wife team, Kara Peterson and Richard DiBona, whose own experience with the legal system inspired them to create a free legal research platform with the goal of democratizing access to legal information.
They used AI to generate summaries and abstracts of court opinions and make them searchable. Last October, they rolled out a major upgrade that included a redesign of its platform, more nuanced and accurate search results, summaries of judicial opinions in Spanish as well as English, and simplified, plain-language summaries in both English and Spanish.
Descrybe was also a finalist this year in the ABA Techshow Startup Alley that I oversee.
Descrybe will continue to offer a free version. Everything that was free remains free, Peterson told me. The paid upgrade it is introducing today adds a number of features that will make it a more attractive legal research option for legal professionals. These features, packaged as Descrybe’s Legal Research Toolkit, include:
- The Cytator. I will write more about this below.
- Brief Checker. Upload a brief — either your own draft or one you receive — and Descrybe will identify hallucinated, inaccurate or incomplete citations. This includes references from its Cytator, so you can not only see whether a citation exists, but whether it is good law.
- Legal Issue Explorer. This tool allows you to see how courts approach similar legal issues, even when described in different terms. Use it to spot related issues and compare how they are treated across different jurisdictions.
- Enhanced search. You can now search using natural language queries, keyword search or case name search, including the ability to use Boolean-style operators. Results include the Cytator treatments.
- Case Analysis. Cases now include issue-by-issue insights including holdings versus dicta, procedural posture, circuit splits, precedential value, and more.
They have kept the cost of this upgraded version extremely affordable. Access for non-commercial use is $10 a month. For commercial use (such as by a lawyer), it is just $20 a month.
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