Fastcase makes legal research easy with site, iPhone app
In 1999, Ed Walters co-founded a legal research company in his living room.
“We grew to the point where the only place in my house that there wasn’t a desk was my bathroom. And that’s when we decided we needed to move,” Walters said.
Fast forward 10 years and Fastcase has 400,000 subscribers, works with 17 state bar associations and just debuted a hot new iPhone app.
Walters, the CEO of Fastcase, and Bar Relations Manager Christina Steinbrecker were on hand at the trade show during Fastcase’s first trip to ABA TechShow.
“The thing about this show that is so great is the people are so curious,” Steinbrecker said. “Usually you’re grabbing people and giving them the overview, but to be able to get into the meat and potatoes of what the service actually does has been really fun.”
What Fastcase does can be narrowed down to two things, Walters said: democratize the law and make research smarter.
“It’s an easy company to get behind when I get out to things like this and talk about how great we are,” Steinbrecker said. “It’s a really important issue in my mind—access to legal research and making it easy and affordable to everyone.”
In the future, Walters wants to expand the number of state bar associations Fastcase works with, continue offering high-touch customer service and expand the company’s mobile services.
Fastcase recently launched the first legal research application for the iPhone. The app is free to everyone and has been hugely successful, he said.
“Free is a very powerful price," Walters said. "For the month after we launched it, the Fastcase app was more popular in the iTunes store than Bing, which I didn’t expect.”
Walters anticipates reaching out to other mobile markets, including Android and Blackberry, in the future. He knows competitors will jump on the mobile bandwagon soon, but he’s confident Fastcase has the edge.
“The future is much more mobile and I want Fastcase to own the mobile market. I want to be the 800 lb. gorilla of mobile," he says, adding, "We were here first.”
