Within minutes of my posting a snarky twit, the phone rang.

Scott, it’s Pablo. Why are you doing this to us, man?

Pablo Arredondo is Casetext’s co-founder, along with Jake Heller. I like these guys, even if I haven’t always been supportive of their coolest new ideas. They’ve had misses and hits, but they’re still standing which is far more than you could say about most of their brethren in the “legaltech” space, creating tools for lawyers that nobody wants or needs. But this time?

In what Casetext cofounder and CEO Jake Heller calls a breakthrough that will have a profound impact on the practice of law, the legal research company is today launching Compose, a first-of-its-kind product that helps you create the first draft of a litigation brief in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

Profound? I like hyperbole as much as the next who hates hyperbole, but profound is a big promise.

The product, the company says, “is poised to disrupt the $437 billion legal services industry and fundamentally change our understanding of what types of professional work are uniquely human.”

Well, that’s the sort of description that could make one guffaw. But sales pitch aside, were they on to something?

To use Compose, a lawyer begins by entering basic information about the  brief, such as the nature of the brief, the jurisdiction, and the lawyer’s position for or against the motion.

Compose then presents the lawyer with a treatise-like outline of what Casetext says are all the available arguments for that motion, as well as the legal standards or rules applicable to each argument.

The lawyer simply peruses the available arguments and standards and then clicks on a standard to add a fully composed paragraph to the brief that states the rule, including citations. The text is fully editable, either within Compose or later when the draft is exported to Word.

Your first “brief” is a loss leader at $99, with your subsequent briefs costing $1,499. If you know nothing about your subject matter, never wrote a memo in support of a motion, are wholly unfamiliar with the case law or are just insufferably lazy, you can use Compose to create a brief that will hopefully get you past Rule 11 sanctions and lose the motion without a complete loss of face. And if that’s what it’s intended to do, then my snarky twit nailed it.

On the other hand, this latest pivot is designed for people who should never be allowed to practice law.

Pablo, however, made the argument that I was blaming the tool for the ineptitude of the mechanic. He had a point. Much of law is repetitive and, well, pro forma. We raise the same issues over and over, at least at the inception of our approach to a case. It’s often said that there’s no purpose in reinventing the wheel, and if what Casetext is selling is the basic round thingy, have they done anything worse than the most tedious and banal aspect of lawyer work?

My concern is that good lawyers approach every case as sui generis. There is no such thing as a “garden variety” case, even if the charges sound pretty much like the charges in every buy and bust ever. Find the difference, whether it’s in the facts or the defendant or the law or something. Find it. Create it. Make it happen. Think it. That’s why the defendant came to you, not to be a yeoman but a master.

For the most part, a lawyer should already be fully familiar with his practice area such that a tool that generates the obvious isn’t needed. You know the case names. You’ve used them a thousand times in prior papers. You know the routine arguments for and against and could draft the suckers into a serviceable memo in your sleep.

So does Compose do it for you so you can get an extra half-hour’s sleep? Maybe. Or maybe you’ve strayed outside your area of knowledge and taken a case where you don’t know the law as well as you should. Maybe you’re just that busy that you can’t get the work done that a client paid you to do, and he’ll never know that you got it from Casetext rather than did it yourself. Clients generally can’t discern good legal work from dreck, so you pay Casetext the $1,499 and charge the client $10,000 and everybody’s happy until you lose the motion,* after which you give the client the standard talk about how losing happens and judges suck.

This is what I fear Compose is most likely to be used for, a quick and easy crutch for the terminally lazy.

But Pablo’s point is well taken, that a tool is only as good as the mechanic using it. It could also be used to provide the basic bones of your argument, whereupon you add your special spices, flavor it to taste and create a delectable dish. It’s kind of like putting your special sauce on a Big Mac.

Of course, the question is whether lawyers who use a tool like Compose will put in the effort to take the basics and make them what their clients need and, more importantly, deserve. Or will they shrug it off and go with the routine?

Then there’s the next level of lawyering. A good lawyer effectively argues the extant law. A great lawyer makes the law. He pushes the envelope to the edge, trying to come up with arguments to achieve what no lawyer before him has ever done before, so that lawyers who follow will regurgitate the arguments he created. One would find this tool, Compose, more useful than the other. Which lawyer do you want to be?

*Does this really happen, you ask? There are lawyers so lazy and incompetent that they just change the names in the caption of their papers and submit the same memo case after case, regardless of relevance or applicability. The worst of them don’t even bother to change the name in the body of the papers, which can be really embarrassing.