The core ROSS legal research platform can now be used by researchers in every area of American law, as it now includes a full suite of case law from all practices areas as well as statutes & regulations. In addition, in line with feedback from our users we’ve continued to refine our interface for a sleeker, more modern look and feel, for a better and more intuitive user experience.

Meet The New ROSS:

The biggest change is that this version now contains ALL American case law. It is no longer necessary for the user to choose a practice area before asking a question, as ROSS will automatically retrieve relevant answers across all US practice areas of law. Of course, users are still able to instantly filter their substantive questions of law with the use of ROSS’ elegantly simple natural language search. For instance, to filter your search by jurisdiction by jurisdiction date, you might try something like: “How do courts apply the Matthews cost-benefit test to determine the scope of a plaintiff’s procedural due process rights in the administrative context in Arkansas after 1997?”

Statutes & Regulations

Just like asking your Natural Language (NLP-based) question to search for case law, the way to search for Statutes & Regulations is by asking a legal question. Upon asking your legal research question, you can switch to the Statutes and to the Regulations tabs. Answer cards are shown for sections of the Statutes or for the Regulations that are relevant to the question posed in the search bar. Upon clicking on the card, these will open the full chapter where these sections come from.

Statutes for “obstruction of justice” for all supported jurisdiction

We’ve also moved the navigation from being horizontal on the top to vertical on the left-hand side. We refer to the new navigation as the “left nav”. All content will appear in the large space to the right of the nav, and you’ll use the left nav to switch between functions. Additionally, answers returned from cases which have received a negative treatment are now circled in red.

Brief Analyzer

This featured, originally released in our completely free EVA tool, is included in the core ROSS product. We played around a bit with layout and design, and after some focus group, we elected to include it on the left nav bar, rather than in its previous setup through a modal window. We also continued to flesh out its functionality, meaning that you can now upload any legal document (not just briefs), either in a .doc, .docx or a .pdf format (note: password protected docs still cause issues sometimes, but this didn’t seem to be a major issue for our users).

Like before, within 1-2 seconds of uploading your doc, you’ll receive a comprehensive and hyperlinked list of cases cited in the brief that have received negative treatments. These cases can then be viewed in ROSS, and incorporated into your research workflow (saved, emailed, printed, instantly summarized, used as a launching for natural language based semantic analysis, etc.)

Law Monitor

This is the notifications section with the ability to view saved notifications found in the new Active Queries item on the left nav. ROSS is trained to track developments in the law with respect to users’ legal issues and send notifications with relevant legal updates. The natural language system we’ve built out allows us to depart from the older, brute force push notifications tied to specific tagged cases being appealed, overturned, etc. Stay tuned for some fun additional buildouts related to this capability moving forward.

What’s next?

We don’t want to give away too much info because there will be plenty more announcements like this coming down the pipe, but in the big picture, the above changes mark the beginning of an iterative process where our engineering team will be conducting weekly sprints to push to production both incremental improvements to the existing ROSS system as well as introducing entire new AI systems to the platform.

Stay tuned, it’s going to be an exciting 2018!

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