Casefleet Founder Jeff Kerr on Fact Management in the Age of AI

Bob Ambrogi (0:03)

Look at LawNext. You might say that chronologies are having a moment in legal tech. A number of AI startups now pitch litigators on turning a messy evidentiary record into a structured timeline in minutes. A guest today was doing that more than a decade before any of them. Jeff Kerr graduated law school in 2010, hung out a shingle in employment law, and then left Practice in 2015 to build Casefleet, a case management platform for litigators. The company has been profitable since 2018 and until now has grown without outside capital. But even though Casefleet was early to market, that has not kept it from embracing AI. Last month, the company launched Casey, an AI agent that builds a case chronology through a conversational interface. With a citation engine, Kerr says, makes fabricated citations structurally impossible. Kerr draws a hard line on agentic AI. Casey researches drafts and recommends, but it doesn't send, file, or act. And Casefleet is edging back toward eDiscovery. Market Kerr tested, but abandoned early on. We talk about all of that, plus what happens to specialized litigation tools if the frontier labs decide to come downstream? I'm Bob Ambrogi and this is LawNext, the podcast that features the innovators and entrepreneurs who are driving what's next in law. And a note, if you are listening to the audio version of the podcast today, you may want to switch over to YouTube and catch the video, as our conversation includes a visual demonstration of some Casefleet features. Before we get to any of that, please take this moment to hear from the sponsors who so generously support LawNext.

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Now let's get to today's conversation.

Jeff, welcome to LawNext.

Jeff Kerr (3:47)

Thanks, Bob. Good to be here.

Bob Ambrogi (3:49)

I am looking forward to this conversation. We haven't had a chance to talk in a while, and I know you guys have been very busy at Casefleet over the last year or so.

Before we talk about any of that, I kind of want to go back and get the background on you and the company. So let's go back to the beginning. I mean, you were a practicing lawyer, and Casefleet kind of grew out of problems you were encountering in your own practice, right?

Jeff Kerr (4:19)

Yeah, that's right. I graduated law school in 2010, and made the kind of crazy decision to start a law firm as my first job out of school. So a friend of mine from school and I started an employment law firm, and we were taking cases and figuring out how to do them. And one of the cool things about having my own practice was that I got to choose which technology we used. And so we were constantly experimenting with what's the best practice management software we can use. How can we better do our intake process? And so there was a lot of legal engineering in my career, even when I was just beginning my practice. And I'm one of those types where building anything, even something inside of an Excel spreadsheet, was kind of addictive and not just snowballed as I was practicing. And once I was at about five years in, as much as I loved working my cases, I was much more interested in building some type of technology tool for practicing lawyers. And I realized that to do it to the extent that I wanted to and to make the product of my dreams, I needed to make it a full-time endeavor. And so I left the practice in 2015 and started Casefleet. Our initial office was the same office that I was in. I was just sort of became a sublessor of the space inside my firm.