CaseText / CoCounsel

01The Full Story: From a Decade-Old Small Company to a $650M Cash Exit

Founder Jake is a lawyer by training who started CaseText in 2013 building legal research tools. Back then the business wasn't sexy — lawyers collectively earn in the trillions, but they spend pitifully little on software, so before LLMs arrived legal tech had a very low market ceiling. Jake later admitted that when he picked this vertical he underestimated how small the market was, and that was a mistake. The turning point came in the summer of 2022. The company was doing about $20M in revenue with close to 100 people — a mid-size SaaS living comfortably but hardly exploding. That's when they got early access to GPT-4, a window only a handful of companies had. Jake then made a call most people couldn't: shut down the entire existing, revenue-generating business and go all in on rebuilding a brand-new product, CoCounsel. CoCounsel is an AI assistant for lawyers: it reads documents, runs legal research, reviews contracts, and organizes evidence. Once the product got good enough, word-of-mouth referrals and press coverage came to them, and the existing sales team essentially became order-takers. About two years ago, legal information giant Thomson Reuters bought it for $650M in cash. That's a public acquisition event, not a valuation story — real money in the bank.