⭐ Issue #94: A 10-Year Overnight Success
How Claremont grad Jake Heller and his team built the world's first AI legal assistant, a new local information startup founded by a Claremont serial entrepreneur, and Silicon Valley's latest unicorn
💬 Welcome to issue #94 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. Let’s jump into…you guessed it, AI. It’s the unsolicited yet oddly helpful guest that won’t leave the party and is involved in everything from our mining operations to our lawmaking.
This week, Claremont grad Jake Heller and his legal tech company, Casetext, celebrate their 10th anniversary. They share how they built the world’s first AI legal assistant. There’s also a new Claremont unicorn in town using AI to dig for EV gold…it’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: Jake Heller
Claremont grad and CEO Jake Heller (PZ ‘07) has been in the field of law for over a decade. After completing his studies at Pitzer, he clerked for Judge Michael Boudin in the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and trained at Stanford Law, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review. He then joined Ropes & Gray as a litigator for two years before co-founding Casetext in 2013.
Casetext is a legal tech company that develops unique, AI-powered technology for lawyers. Their latest product offering, CoCounsel, is the world’s first AI legal assistant powered by the first LLM to pass the bar exam. Jake and his company recently celebrated their 10th anniversary, and they shared the interesting story of how Casetext went from a team of just three to spearheading the application of AI in the practice of law.
As a student working in the Community Law Clinic at Stanford Law, Jake Heller was struck by how inaccessible legal information was compared to information in other fields. He understood for there to be equal access to justice, there needed to be equal access to the text of the law itself.
By early 2013, Heller had been a litigation associate at Ropes & Gray for more than a year, following a First Circuit Court of Appeals clerkship and fellowship with the Massachusetts Governor’s Office of Legal Counsel. A Silicon Valley native who’d been coding since he was nine, Heller was perplexed by the disparity between outdated legal tech and powerful everyday tech. “I’d spend four nights in a row until 4 AM looking for one specific court case for a client—but I could find a specific style of Thai restaurant within a mile of my house in minutes.”
So Heller teamed up with Harvard Law grad and practicing attorney Joanna Huey, who shared his frustration with the state of legal tech and his vision for disruption. Their idea to make the law publicly available through crowdsourcing—a Wikipedia for the law—was accepted by startup incubator Y Combinator, and in October 2013 a startup was born, backed by $1.8 million in seed funding.
A month later, Heller left Ropes & Gray to work full-time on building a crowdsourced legal database, while Huey left their startup to pursue a career in legal education, eventually becoming a law professor.
Soon after Huey’s departure, Heller brought Pablo Arredondo and Laura Safdie on as co-founders.
The trio of co-founders worked out of Heller’s living room in Sunnyvale, where they continued developing a free legal research platform offering millions of cases, statutes, and legal texts annotated by a community of practicing attorneys.
By February 2015, Casetext was attracting more than 250,000 users each month and had raised $7 million in Series A funding. But they were facing serious barriers to continuing to offer their free platform. Chief among them: though lawyers absolutely saw the value in such a resource, they simply didn’t have enough time to contribute to it. So the trio made the strategic decision to focus on the technology Arredondo had been building.
OpenAI taps Casetext to bring GPT-4 to the law
As Casetext continued updating its platform to take advantage of the latest AI, the team tracked the progress of transformer-based neural net technology and LLMs, particularly the gains being made by OpenAI in generative transformer-based technology. The nonprofit AI research lab had launched in 2015 and was making notable progress with its Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or GPT, technology.
Since Casetext’s inception, Laura, Pablo, and Jake have remained focused on their vision that AI would transform more than just legal research, advancing the efficiency and quality of work across every facet of a lawyer’s practice. They envisioned integrated technology that would empower attorneys to spend more of their limited time on complex work, ultimately elevating their practice. And they were convinced LLMs were the key to this technology.
When the team was given a look at GPT-3 in 2022, they knew the technology was advancing toward what they needed to power Casetext’s next phase of legal AI offerings, but wasn’t there yet. They never imagined it would be only months later, and that Casetext’s next phase was less than a year away.
Read the full article to learn more about Casetext’s first paid product and how it became the solution that put the company on the map. 👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Hamlet
Claremont grad Sunil Rajaraman (CMC ‘01) is an accomplished technology executive and serial founder who helped found and run Scripted.com, a marketplace for businesses to hire freelance writers; Unsugarcoat Media, which acquired The Bold Italic and subsequently sold it to Medium; and Radiance Labs, which helps companies communicate with customers on Facebook Messenger and SMS. He just started working on a new venture, and Sunil is excited to share more information on his new local information startup, Hamlet.
“Hamlet transforms local information into accessible insights you can use and shares it via newsletter. We want to help connect communities to where they live by providing tools that give you the advantage of being a well-informed and empowered resident. We’ll cover the details of real estate, development, business openings and closings, crime and safety, voter guides, and other updates to help make a positive impact.”
They recently launched a first version in ~30 CA cities and are expected to roll out more updates in the coming weeks. Check out their website to learn more, stay updated, and read more about your city.
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Curated & Agile Six
Claremont entrepreneur Peter Ombres (CMC ‘04) is the Co-founder and COO of the online shopping service company, Curated. They make high-stakes purchases easier by connecting their customers with real experts who can give one-on-one personalized advice to find the right products and the best deals. Curated has raised $140M+ in venture funding and is backed by experts from Forerunner, Greylock, and CapitalG. They’re hiring for several open positions:
Agile Six, co-founded by Claremont grad and COO Brian Derfer (PO ‘90), is a full-spectrum digital services company whose mission is transforming government and private sector relationships. They work with government agencies to create customized digital solutions that help build the civic tech marketplace –partnering with clients like the Centers for Medicare, Medicaid Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Agile Six’s coaching services and workshops also influenced the development of a new voluntary primary care model that will be launched next year. They’re hiring more data folks to join their team:
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Congratulations to Claremont grad Kurt House (CMC ‘01) and KoBold Metals, one of Silicon Valley’s latest unicorns! The mining startup uses data science and machine learning to identify deposits of cobalt, copper, nickel, and lithium, crucial components of the electric-vehicle boom. Co-founder and CEO Kurt House shared that the company has raised ~$200M, a part of which will be used to help develop copper reserves they acquired in Zambia. The company is backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a16z, and BOND. This round values KoBold Metals at $1B+, making it the 27th Claremont-founded startup to reach unicorn status.
Congratulations to Trestle Biotherapeutics on being among the eight Artificial Kidney Prize Phase 2 winners. Trestle, co-founded by Claremont grad Alice Chen (PO), was recognized for its innovative approach to developing bioengineered kidney tissues for patients with kidney failure. The company received $1M to continue developing a functional, stem cell-based tissue to eliminate kidney dialysis dependency.
Congratulations to Claremont entrepreneur Henry Albrecht (CMC ‘91) and Limeade on their successful exit. Limeade is an immersive employee well-being company that creates healthy employee experiences. They have been pioneering employee experience research since 2006, uncovering the statistically valid predictors of human well-being at work. WebMD is set to acquire the company for ~$75M.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Claremont VC David Van Wie (PO ‘87) joined the Startup Hustle podcast to discuss deep tech venture capital. He goes in-depth on how he views deep technology and why it’s the core focus of their perpetual IP income fund. David is the Founder and CIO of Aventurine – a firm that focuses on inventors, researchers, and entrepreneurs with strong and impactful Foundational IP.
Claremont grad Edith Harbaugh (HMC) talks about the importance of customer feedback when building developer products on the WorkOS podcast. She also shares the story of how she put together an early sales team for her company and the first time they ever tried selling to their customers. Edith is the Co-founder and Executive Chair of LaunchDarkly – a unicorn software development management platform she founded with fellow Claremont grad John Kodumal (HMC).
Everything else you need to know💡
Editas Medicine (Nasdaq: EDIT) announced the pricing of an underwritten offering of its common stock. The clinical-stage genome editing company focuses on translating CRISPR and Cas9 editing systems into a pipeline of treatments for people living with serious diseases around the world. Claremont biochemist and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna (PO ‘85) is a Co-founder.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🤖 Embracing AI In Government….. As AI technology becomes increasingly integrated into our daily lives, it’s important to address the technology’s underlying issues – especially when it comes to its use in the public sector. In his recent article, Claremont grad and govtech entrepreneur Abhi Nemani (CMC ‘10) talks about the history of AI in government and explores the vast opportunities that generative AI and LLMs offer. Abhi is the Founder and Managing Director of EthosLabs – a global govtech consulting and investment firm.
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