Monday, October 5, 2026
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Filing Accuses Westlaw Entity of Anti-Competitive Practices
Putative Class Complaint Says Owner of Legal-Research Giant Participates in ‘Duopoly’ With LexisNexis to Keep Prices for Subscription Services High, Purchased Upstart Casetext Inc. in ‘Killer Acquisition’
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
A putative class action has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California accusing Thomson Reuters and West Publishing Corporation, the owners of the popular Westlaw platform, of purchasing the emerging legal-research company Casetext Inc. in a so-called “killer acquisition” deal designed to shut down the competitor’s lower-priced offerings in violation of federal and state law.
The pleading, filed on Thursday by the Carlsbad-based Rubin Law Firm P.C., asserts claims under the Sherman Act, which prohibits price-fixing and other arrangements that unreasonably restrain trade, the Clayton Act, which bars mergers and acquisitions that may substantially lessen competition, as well as California’s antitrust law, found at Business and Professions Code §16720 et seq.
Rubin Law alleged in the filing that the defendants participate in a “duopoly” with LexisNexis to “extract immense, non-competitive subscription fees” from lawyers and entered into a purchase agreement with Casetext to “suppress a disruptive upstart, eliminate downstream pricing discipline, and lock legal professionals into artificially inflated, supra-competitive pricing tiers.”
Budget-Conscious Challenger
The firm continued:
“Casetext entered the market as a nimble, budget-conscious horizontal challenger. By offering a comprehensive, highly reliable federal and state case-law database at a fraction of the cost of the duopoly incumbents, Casetext established a vital competitive anchor. For solo practitioners and small law firms, Casetext provided a refuge from predatory legal tech pricing; for the broader legal market, Casetext’s presence acted as a critical check on Westlaw’s and Lexis’s ability to unilaterally escalate subscription rates.”
The plaintiff claimed that after Casetext founders Jake Heller and Pablo Arredondo launched CoCounsel on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on March 1, 2023, touting it as the world’s first artificial-intelligence legal assistant, the defendants set out to buy the company “to liquidate a nascent competitor and acquire its pathbreaking technology.”
A few months later, Thomson Reuters announced that it had agreed to acquire Casetext for $650 million, a figure Rubin Law described as “highly inflated” in light of the company’s “modest existing revenue base.” The deal closed in August 2023.
Platform Shuttered
According to the plaintiff, Thomson Reuters retired the Casetext platform as of April 1 of last year and moved CoCounsel to Westlaw as a tool available to higher-paying, premium subscribers.
Rubin Law, a law firm established by a solo-practitioner, said that it “represents the exact consumer demographic caught in this anticompetitive vice,” alleging that, as a “subscriber to Casetext’s budget-friendly basic plan since late September 2018 at approximately $32.50 per month based on an annual rate, Plaintiff was notified in March 2025 that its chosen platform was being eliminated.”
The plaintiff added:
“Left with no viable, comprehensive independent alternatives, Plaintiff was forced to migrate to a Westlaw Classic three-year baseline contract at the drastically inflated rate of $111.48 per month—a sudden, out-of-pocket pricing surcharge of nearly 250% for standard case-law verification utilities. Worse yet, Westlaw Classic’s rate offered to Plaintiff had a built-in increase the second year of four percent (4%) to $115.94 per month. The third-year rate had a built-in increase of four percent (4%) to $120.58 per month.”
Seeking certification of nationwide and California classes of active baseline Westlaw users, Rubin Law prayed for treble damages under the federal and state statutory schemes as well as injunctive relief “including but not limited to, ordering Thomson Reuters to divest, spin out, or re-establish Casetext and CoCounsel as an independent, standalone corporate competitor.”
There does not appear to be a Rubin Law Firm P.C. operating in the Carlsbad area, but there is a Rubin Law Office P.C. run by California defense attorney David J. Rubin.
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