AI and the Future of Law: The 10 Year "Overnight" Success Story | Main Function

**Garry Tan** (0:00)
This is Jake Heller. He's the co-founder of Casetext, which sold for $650 million earlier this year. It's one of the mega wins in AI. And today, he's going to tell us how he did it and how he built something that reduces weeks of painstaking legal work down into just minutes, and why that turned into million-dollar contracts for his startup. Large language models are creating ridiculously huge opportunity. And today, we're going to learn about Jake's story.
Let's get started.
Thank you At YC, one of the things I've learned is that it takes someone who understands the world from a very specific perspective. That person needs to be combined with people who can build incredible technology. Jake's origins actually started in the legal world.

**Jake Heller** (1:06)
I had actually a very early traditional legal career.
I practiced law at a big law firm. Before that, I clerked for a federal circuit judge.
I had the privilege of, just for a summer, working in Obama's White House as a intern in the White House Counsel's Office. So I was able to see some interesting sides of the practice of law. And it was also pretty apparent early on that it was an area that could be improved with technology, pretty substantially. You know, it's not any one story, but there are many instances where it was like 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and I'm trying to just find one piece of information that might help with a case. And we're talking about like a piece of evidence that might swing a billion dollar lawsuit in one direction or another, or for our pro bono work, a single legal case that might help somebody who might go to jail, not go to jail. So like literally life or death or making or breaking a business. And it was just so hard. And I would then like go on my iPhone and look for like takeout Thai food or something. And that was insanely easy. And so we knew that the technology to do relatively trivial stuff, like find nearby restaurants or good reviews of them or what have you was there. And it just felt like this big disconnect where things that really mattered at the end of the day, like whether or not somebody spends their life in prison, technology wasn't really helping there.

**Garry Tan** (2:31)
Among the best founders, this feeling that Jake describes is very common. What does it feel like when you realize technology has made basic consumer actions, like ordering my lunch, very easy, but my work is so hard? We're still just a decade into this megatrend idea that great software, now AI, has only made it into a very, very small percentage of the total pie of GDP, what the world needs. And like Jake mentions, sometimes it's very important, life or death things that are the largest markets.
Casetext was one of the companies I got to work with in my early days in YC in 2013 One of my notes from June 2013 about Jake, I said, impressed by this team, articulate, accomplished, and good at building software to boot.

**Jake Heller** (3:27)
So Casetext changed considerably over the course of our 10 years. What stayed the same is we had a vision around applying some of the best technology to the legal profession to make it so that when lawyers are doing their critical work, oftentimes life-changing or saving a business or what have you, that they were getting the best access to the most modern technology.
In the very early days, the best technology and the ones that we got most excited about were around, for example, crowdsourcing and applying very early and rudimentary versions of natural language processing to help lawyers do legal work.

**Garry Tan** (4:00)
They started off as a crowdsourced case law library where users would edit and annotate, then have other users upvote or downvote the annotations, like Wikipedia meets Reddit. But for the law, from 2013 to 2023, selling for $650 million, that's literally a 10-year overnight success.

**Jake Heller** (4:22)
That was literally us. It took us basically 10 years to get to a place where we had a product that was truly, truly amazing. But we also made mistakes. There are times during that path where we thought we had extreme product market fit, where we thought everything was perfect.

**Garry Tan** (4:36)
At YC, we have a diagram that describes the 10-year overnight success as the process. After the launch, after the adrenaline wears off, you go into the trough of sorrow and the wiggles of hope.

**Jake Heller** (4:51)
One early moment, we created a product that a number of enterprise firms seemed really excited about.