Somebody had to do it at some point and they did say although their publishing days were over that they were happy to use what remaining funds they had to keep TR in court. TR have a bottomless pit of money so it’s going to be an uphill struggle for ROSS. Will we see this in court this time next year? Who Knows?
Here’s what they have published on the ( still operating as an info source) website as they head back into battle
For far too long, Westlaw has maintained an unearned monopoly over legal research, quashing any competitor and restricting access to the public law to those able to pay its exorbitant prices. We can no longer allow the law to be held ransom behind the paywalls of a corporate monopoly.
America is a country based on laws. The law belongs to all of us. It governs us, protects us, and forms the basis of our great democracy. Our highest ideal is justice for all. This depends on the people—all people—having access to the law. But for Westlaw, the public law is nothing but a commodity to be bought and purchased and a fiefdom to be protected at all costs. Starting today, this stops.
ROSS is filing antitrust claims against Thomson Reuters and West Publishing. As explained in our filing, Westlaw’s business model is to build walls around the public law to unfairly maintain control over the $8 billion-dollar legal research marketplace. It does so through sham litigations, restrictive licensing conditions, phony copyright claims, and the like – anything and everything to protect its monopoly.
We started ROSS with a simple dream: democratize the law and make it available to all, not only those with wealth, to level the playing field. We have never wavered from that dream or our vision to inspire technological innovation to ensure access to justice, even when Westlaw uses every weapon available to it to destroy us and prevent us from realizing our dreams. Today is simply another step to fulfilling that dream. Today, ROSS fights for you, the people.
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Andrew Arruda, Jimoh Ovbiagele, Pargles Dall’Oglio, and the ROSS team
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Ambrogi writes up the first skirmish of 2021.
In the continuing litigation between now-shuttered legal research startup ROSS Intelligence and long-established legal research giant Thomson Reuters, ROSS today filed an amended answer in which it raises a new counterclaim, asserting that TR is violating federal antitrust law by maintaining monopolistic and anticompetitive control over the legal research market.
“Westlaw has for far too long impermissibly controlled legal research and restricted access to the public law,” ROSS cofounder and CEO Andrew Arruda told my by email. “Enough is enough. We started ROSS with the mission to democratize law because the law belongs to the people. We will now fight in court to preserve that mission and end Westlaw’s monopoly on access to public law.”
As I reported here in December, TR’s lawsuit against ROSS alleging copyright infringement has forced ROSS to shut down its operations effective Jan. 31. But ROSS has vowed to continue fighting the lawsuit, which it characterizes as a bullying tactic by TR to shut down a potential rival.
TR, in a lawsuit filed last May, alleges that ROSS stole content from Westlaw to build its own competing legal research product. ROSS did this, TR alleged, by “intentionally and knowingly” inducing the legal research and writing company LegalEase Solutions to use its Westlaw account to deliver Westlaw data to ROSS en masse.
