The rent-seeking cartels strike again.<p>I think Emerson is apposite here: "When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”<p>Attacking an entrenched monopoly or cartel is pretty hard to bootstrap. When you are small you can make progress as you are invisible to the big guys. Once you start to ve visible they will reach out and crush you long before you can pose a threat.<p>Legal efforts like NoLo have survived because they <i>don't</i> threaten the kinds, but merely replace small lawyers.<p>The only paths I've seen work (and they are very hard) against the cartels are 1 - to slowly build a movement, so by the time it is visible it is actually already too big to crush. This requires recruiting all sorts of allies, like (in this case) some significant law firms, which means figuring out for them what's in it for them. Or 2 - get a bit of traction and then raise so much money that you can in fact stand up to the big guys. But you need a business model that pays the investors back. Also not easy.
Ross intelligence seems to have hired a third party to generate 120,000 legal "memos" to train their AI system.<p>Those memos link cases to bits of law they rely on.<p>The third party did that by scraping Thompson Reuters Westlaw.<p>Now Ross is upset they have a lawsuit on their hands...
> Since then, we’ve created a product that legal researchers love. We’ve worked with amazing partners to make legal research tasks more efficient and delightful.<p>Slightly off-topic, but this sounds like the strange kind of marketing that is common around startups. Why would they still use it while announcing shutting down?
If I were the ROSS intelligence guys, I would've instead open sourced it, and donated the tech to EFF or GNU or another
non-profit foundation. That way ROSS would have a continuing impact, on a global scale.<p>You can't slay a king alone, you'll need help for that.
If Thomson Reuters is smart, they should try to acquihire the 3 founders so they can at least return their investors’ capital and make a bit of money themselves. Then they should turn the tech into a feature of their legal research service. There is obviously a lot of promise in using ML techniques to assist lawyers in finding relevant cases, and it would probably be hard for them to recruit good entrepreneurial people in a stuffy old company like that. And as part of the company they could have unfettered access to all the Westlaw content they could want to train their system better.
TR as a company operates like a sociopath. The individual people are all very nice though. It is quite odd. Buy your small company just to eliminate it, but with a smile and a nice severance package.