Type casetext.com into a browser today and you do not reach Casetext. You are redirected to a Thomson Reuters page for a product called CoCounsel. There is no notice, no explanation, and nothing that tells you what happened to the site you were looking for.
Here is the short version. Thomson Reuters bought Casetext in 2023 for $650 million in cash. For a while the product carried on under its own name. In the spring of 2025 the standalone platform was switched off, accounts were closed, and the technology was folded into Thomson Reuters' own, considerably more expensive, products. Casetext is not paused or rebranded. You cannot sign up for it.
How we checked the shutdown date. Thomson Reuters did not publish a closure announcement we could find. Archived snapshots of casetext.com show the site still serving its own pages on 1 February 2025 and already redirecting to Thomson Reuters by 1 June 2025. Several industry sources put the date at 31 March 2025, which fits the archive. We have not found official confirmation of the exact day.
The timeline
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| June 2023 | Thomson Reuters announces it will buy Casetext for $650 million in cash. |
| August 2023 | The acquisition completes. Thomson Reuters describes CoCounsel as an AI legal assistant built on GPT-4. |
| 2023–2024 | Casetext continues to operate under its own name while its team builds CoCounsel inside Thomson Reuters. |
| Spring 2025 | The standalone Casetext platform is retired. Industry reporting gives 31 March 2025. |
| Now | casetext.com returns a permanent redirect to the Thomson Reuters CoCounsel page. |
Why anyone still cares about a dead product
Casetext mattered because of one feature. CARA AI — Case Analysis Research Assistant — let you upload a brief you had already written and get back the authority it was missing. You did not have to guess the right search terms. The document was the query.
That inversion sounds small and was not. Every other research tool at the time asked you to describe what you were looking for in keywords, which meant you could only find what you already knew to ask about. CARA worked from the argument itself, which meant it could surface the case you had never heard of. A companion feature, Parallel Search, matched on the meaning of a sentence rather than the words in it.
Casetext was also priced for firms that could not justify Westlaw or Lexis. For a lot of small practices it was the first competent research tool they could actually afford. That is the part that did not survive: the capability moved up into enterprise products, and the price moved with it.
If you are looking for free case law
This is the question behind most searches for Casetext now, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a product pitch. Casetext ran a free public case law search. When the platform closed, that went too. Two free replacements are worth knowing about.
| Where | What it is | What it will not do |
|---|---|---|
| CourtListener | Run by the non-profit Free Law Project. One of the largest collections of American case law on the open web, with records going back to the 1650s, plus the RECAP Archive of federal court filings. | No citator. It has a 'Cited By' tab, which is useful but is not the same as being told a case has been overruled. |
| Google Scholar | Free case law search covering US Supreme Court, federal appellate and district courts, and state appellate courts. The easiest place to start if you have a case name. | Basic citation signals only, and no guarantee of currency. Coverage gaps are not flagged. |
The thing free tools do not give you is a citator. A citator tells you whether a case has been overturned, limited, or questioned by a later court — whether it is still good law. Finding a case is easy; knowing it still stands is the part you pay for. If you are relying on a case for anything that matters, that gap is the risk, not the search itself.
If you were paying for Casetext
The official successor is Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, which is genuinely the product Casetext's team went on to build. The capability is real. The difference is how it is sold: CoCounsel is quoted rather than publicly priced, and is normally discussed alongside a Westlaw subscription. If Casetext was affordable for you specifically because it was not Westlaw, the successor may not solve the same problem.
A number of smaller AI research tools have appeared to catch exactly this group, several priced between about $20 and $40 a month. We have not tested them and will not rank them here on the strength of their own marketing. Which brings us to something worth saying plainly.
A warning about the search results you are reading
Search for a Casetext alternative and most of the top results are published by companies selling a Casetext alternative. The comparison tables on those pages are written by the party that comes out well in them. That is not fraud, but it is advertising, and it reads like journalism.
A quick test: does the page recommend anything the publisher does not sell? Does it name a free option? Does it say what its own product is bad at? Most of these pages fail all three. We sell subscriptions to our own tools, so apply the same test here — and note that the two options above are free, run by a non-profit and a search engine, and earn us nothing.
The pattern worth noticing
Casetext is the second well-known AI legal research company to disappear, and both disappearances involved the same buyer. ROSS Intelligence shut down in 2021 while being sued by Thomson Reuters, and lost a significant ruling in 2025, four years after it had already closed. Casetext was bought instead of sued, which is a better outcome for its founders, but the product is equally gone.
For anyone choosing a legal research tool, the practical lesson is not that acquisitions are bad. It is that a cheap, well-designed tool from a small company is a bet on that company staying independent, and the base rate on that bet in this market is poor. Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose, and prefer tools whose output you can take with you.
If you came here because a link stopped working or an account vanished: nothing is wrong at your end. The product was switched off, and nobody told you.
An honest look at what the free tools can and cannot do.
Editorial note: AI For Legal Research publishes independent content. We do not accept payment for editorial coverage or review scores. Nothing on this site constitutes legal advice. Always consult a qualified attorney for legal matters.