Future Citators 🚩
That little red flag—the one that tells you when a case is bad law—may not be the sexiest feature in a legal research platform. But it is perhaps the most important.
We’re building an AI-powered citator to overcome the shortcomings of the so-called gold standards.
Gold Standards… Right 66% Of The Time?
A citator is the backbone of a legal research platform. But most lawyers are surprised to learn that industry-gold-standards, Shepard’s and KeyCite, perform wildly differently. In fact, they miss or mislabel about one-third of negative citing relationships sampled in a study by Paul Hellyer at William & Mary Law School.
Still, Lexis and Westlaw have Shepard's and KeyCite, respectively, to thank for their decades-long dominance of all things legal research. This is because maintaining a comprehensive relational database of case law has always been a resource-intensive process that few companies can afford.
But this is changing. Generative AI makes it possible to build a citator for less. And given the shortcomings of the traditional (largely human-powered) citators that have reigned supreme for so long, the AI-powered citator of the future may very well be more reliable than Shepard's and KeyCite.
The midpage.ai Citator: Coming This February
Over the past few months, we've been hard at work building this citator of the future. Early results are promising, but because reliability is key, we are collaborating with Vanderbilt’s AI Law Lab (VAILL) to evaluate its performance. We plan to release it to the public sometime in February.
This will benefit our users in several ways. First, the addition of a reliable citator will make midpage.ai a true, affordable alternative to Lexis and Westlaw. Second, it will improve every aspect of our existing platform, from search to AI filters to chat. And third, it will open the door to drafting and cite-checking tools you can rely on.
Don’t Wait: Lock in Discounted Pricing
Users who sign up before the citator is released will get midpage for the current price ($99/month), which we will raise once the citator is released.