Today, legal publishers Casemaker and Fastcase announced their merger thereby creating the largest legal research platform by subscriber count – over one million. According to the press release:
The two companies will combine their teams and technologies to innovate research, analytics, and workflow offerings that empower lawyers with powerful digital solutions for their clients.
The two companies have taken a similar trajectory in creating an affordable and widely accessible alternative to the global publishers that dominate American law, offering subscriptions to bar associations, who subscribe on behalf of their members. Each company offers its subscribers different products, and this merger allows the combined company to offer state bar associations the best of both, a more complete alternative for legal research.
As Dewey B Strategic points out:
Since Fastcase and Casemaker together are available to every bar association in the United States – that means that virtually every lawyer in the US has access to Fastcase/Casemaker. So David suddenly has a larger lawyer user footprint than the Goliaths (Westlaw and LexisNexis).
It will be interesting to see how this new combined platform develops. According to the press release, the companies will continue to support their subscribers and their subscriptions uninterrupted as they work out details for future platform development.
State Bar of Wisconsin members have had access to Fastcase as a free benefit of membership since 2008. For a list of other state bar associations’ legal research subscription benefits, see Duke Law Library’s research guide.
For more information on the merger and what it may mean for legal research going forward, see Dewey B Strategic.