First to See the Light

Spencer Trask & Co. Venture Fastcase Merges with Legal Intelligence Platform vLex

Photo credit: The New York Times

Deal for Cash and Stock Organized by Oakley Capital.

Advanced technology development firm Spencer Trask & Co. today announced the merger of Fastcase with vLex in a transaction funded by private equity firms Bain Capital and Oakley Capital.  The new venture provides a combined 3.8 million users in over 100 countries with smart access to the most extensive collection of legal and regulatory information in the world.

 

Spencer Trask & Co. was the first institutional investor in Fastcase and its largest shareholder. “We’re really proud to see Fastcase take its mission to the global stage.” Spencer Trask & Co. Chairman, Kevin Kimberlin

The flagship Fastcase service extracts value from the entire corpus of U.S. law – from all 50 states, all Federal and appellate courts, the U.S. Code, the Federal Register from inception, and the Congressional Record volumes in their entirety. The firm provides highly accurate methods for researching these millions of pages of legal documents with predictive analytics and AI-enhanced smart tools. This provides analysis unavailable elsewhere such as case-prediction indicators on judges, venues, adversaries, and attorneys, and measures of gender diversity at law firms.

Revenues in the global legal services industry reached $900 billion in 2022 and yet the legal field has been slow to adopt technologies that are standard fare for financial, retail, and information service providers.

“Artificial intelligence and data analytics technology, used routinely elsewhere, will be demanded by discerning legal clients in the future,” said Ed Walters, Fastcase co-founder and CEO. “So Fastcase combined these must-have analytics with the largest law library in the world.”  

For its technology backbone, Fastcase acquired legal search firm Judicata, funded by Khosla Ventures and Peter Thiel, and run by Blake Masters, now COO of Thiel Ventures. The Judicata senior team remained with Fastcase.

“From the beginning, Spencer Trask supported our mission to democratize the law in the United States.  vLex is the perfect partner to scale this mission globally,” concluded Walters.

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The Immune Response Corporation

Revolution in Immunotherapy

DISCOVERY – Non-infectious viral vaccines.

INNOVATOR – In the history of medicine, few figures have had as profound an impact on human health and wellbeing as Dr. Jonas Salk. His polio vaccine breakthrough was the culmination of centuries of research, dating back to Louis Pasteur discovering inoculation. However, Salk’s method was different. He found a way to protect people from viruses without giving them the very disease the vaccine was designed to prevent.

Using this no-infection method, Salk worked with Kevin Kimberlin of Spencer Trask to develop cancer vaccines and an immunotherapeutic to slow or prevent AIDS. They patented and conducted preclinical studies on a cancer vaccine that demonstrated a startling 90% protection against lethal malignancies. 

IMPACT – A fusion of dendritic cells and the cancer antigen, their technology formed the basis for the first FDA-approved cell-based immunotherapy. Over 40,000 men with metastatic castrate-resistant prostate cancer have received the treatment, and it appears especially effective for African-American men who receive a 48% improved survival benefit compared to white men.

The team and facility making this immunotherapy also made clinical and commercial supplies of the first approved gene therapy, the CAT-T drug Kymriah.

The first approved cell-base immunotherapy and gene therapy prompted the FDA Commissioner to say, “New technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold out the potential to transform medicine and create an inflection point in our ability to treat and even cure many intractable illnesses.”

The noninfectious vaccine approach developed by Jonas Salk eliminated polio from the developed countries, his flu vaccine mitigated the effects of influenza for the past 75 years, and finally, the cancer vaccine developed at his Immune Response Corporation led the way to gene, cell-based, and immune therapy innovations that will impact human health for generations. In summary, Salk released the last step in enabling the most important preventative medicine – non-infectious viral vaccination.