Casetext Shut Down: What Happened, Casetext CoCounsel, Casetext Search and Casetext Login
Thomson Reuters closed Casetext on 1 April 2025. Checked on 19 August 2026, casetext.com now returns HTTP 410 Gone on every URL we tried, including its robots.txt, which means the archive is not just offline, it is being deliberately removed from search. Here is what that does to your old links, what replaced the product, and where former subscribers actually go. If you just need the case, start in the box on the right.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
In short
Casetext was a low-cost US legal research service that Thomson Reuters bought for 650 million dollars in August 2023 and shut down on 1 April 2025. Its technology now ships as CoCounsel Legal inside the Westlaw product line, sold by quote with no published rate. There is no Casetext login left: the sign-in page returns HTTP 403 behind a bot challenge. Every Casetext case law link ever published now returns HTTP 410 Gone, a permanent-removal status served site-wide, so any Casetext citation in an old brief or memo is dead with no redirect. CARA, Compose and SmartCite went with it, and SmartCite had no export path. All URLs verified 19 August 2026. Informational research, not legal advice, and always verify the citation.
Last updated August 2026
Checked, not remembered
What casetext.com does today
Almost everything written about the Casetext shutdown was published in 2025 and describes the announcement. Nobody went back to ask what the domain actually does now. We did, on 19 August 2026, with plain HTTP requests. The answer turns out to be more interesting than the press release, because the status code Thomson Reuters chose says something the announcement did not.
| What you are asking about | Status today | How we know |
|---|---|---|
| Any Casetext case law URL | HTTP 410 Gone. Permanently retired, on purpose. | casetext.com/case/roe-v-wade returns HTTP 410 Gone. So does every other path we tried. The response is 640 bytes of plain text served by Cloudflare, with no redirect to a replacement. A 404 says "not found"; a 410 says "this existed, it is gone for good, drop it from your index". Thomson Reuters chose the stronger of the two. |
| The message on those dead pages | A farewell note, quoted in full below. | Every 410 carries the same body: "Casetext. This service is no longer available, but we appreciate you being a part of it. For legal research, please visit Westlaw, and if you're curious about legal AI, check out CoCounsel. Thanks for stopping by!" It links to two Thomson Reuters pages and nothing else. |
| casetext.com/robots.txt | HTTP 410 Gone as well. | The domain no longer serves a robots file. Neither does casetext.com/sitemap.xml, which also returns 410. A live site that merely retired a product keeps those two files. Serving 410 on both is what winding a domain down looks like. |
| A URL that never existed | Also HTTP 410. | We requested casetext.com/anything-random-xyz and got the same 410 rather than a 404. That confirms a blanket catch-all rule at the edge, not a per-page cleanup. Every Casetext address ever published now resolves the same way. |
| The Casetext homepage and login | HTTP 403 behind a bot challenge. No sign-in reachable. | casetext.com and casetext.com/login both return HTTP 403 with the Cloudflare interstitial titled "Just a moment...". Unlike Westlaw, LexisNexis and Fastcase, where the old login outlived the product name, there is no working Casetext sign-in door left to walk through. |
| The successor link Casetext gives you | Already one rename out of date. | The 410 page points at legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-core, which returns HTTP 301 to /products/cocounsel-legal. The farewell note was written before the product it recommends was renamed, and nobody went back to update it. |
| A published CoCounsel Legal rate | None. | legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal returns HTTP 200, but /products/cocounsel-legal/pricing returns HTTP 404. The product that replaced a 65 dollar self-serve subscription does not publish a number anywhere. |
| www.casetext.com | HTTP 301 to the bare domain, then the same wall. | The www host still redirects correctly to casetext.com. It is the one piece of the infrastructure still behaving normally, and it delivers you straight to the challenge page. |
All rows read directly from casetext.com, www.casetext.com, parallelsearch.casetext.com and legal.thomsonreuters.com on 19 August 2026. Vendor infrastructure changes without notice, so re-check before relying on any of it.
The detail everybody missed
Why a 410 is not the same as a broken link
When a page disappears, servers usually answer 404 Not Found. It is the lazy default, it costs nothing to leave in place, and it carries no commitment: the page might come back tomorrow. Search engines treat it that way too, revisiting a 404 for weeks before giving up on it.
410 Gone is a different statement. It means the resource existed, has been intentionally removed, and is not coming back, so remove it from your index. Almost nobody bothers to configure it, because it takes deliberate effort and the only beneficiary is a crawler. Thomson Reuters configured it across an entire domain, including a path we invented on the spot that had never existed, and including robots.txt and sitemap.xml.
What it means for your citations
Casetext gave its case law away free, so its links spread everywhere: briefs, internal memos, client emails, law school research guides, bar CLE handouts, Wikipedia footnotes and thousands of blog posts. Every one of those links is now dead, with no redirect to an equivalent page anywhere. If a court, a client or a colleague clicks a Casetext citation you sent them, they get a farewell note.
What it means for search
A site-wide 410 is the fastest way to purge a domain from Google and Bing. Casetext pages that still show up in results are cached remnants on their way out. That matters if you are hunting for an opinion by pasting its name into a search box: the Casetext copy that used to rank for almost every US case is being withdrawn, and the free alternatives that remain do not rank as well.
What it tells you about intent
Compare this with how the other big vendors retire a name. Thomson Reuters kept the WestlawNext host answering. LexisNexis still routes advance.lexis.com to a working sign-in. Fastcase still redirects its login to a live gateway. In each case the old address leads somewhere useful. Casetext is the only one of the four where the door is bolted rather than moved.
That contrast is worth sitting with, because it is a fair guide to what happens when a research product is acquired. A rename leaves a trail you can follow, which is what we documented on our WestlawNext page and our Lexis Advance page. A shutdown does not. When you are choosing a legal research subscription, the question of what happens to your links and your saved work if the vendor is bought is not paranoid. It is the single thing Casetext subscribers wish they had asked.
Quoted in full, verbatim
What Casetext says when you knock
"Casetext. This service is no longer available, but we appreciate you being a part of it. For legal research, please visit Westlaw, and if you're curious about legal AI, check out CoCounsel. Thanks for stopping by!"
Served as the body of every HTTP 410 response on casetext.com. Read 19 August 2026.
Two links sit in that note and nothing else. The first points at the Westlaw product page, which is live. The second points at CoCounsel Core, which returns a 301 redirect to CoCounsel Legal. So the farewell message recommends a product under a name that has since been changed, and nobody has been back to fix it. It is a small thing, but it tells you how much attention the wound-down domain gets.
Note also what the note does not offer: no data export, no account lookup, no support contact, no way to retrieve the annotations and saved research that Casetext users built up over a decade. If you need any of that, Thomson Reuters support is the only door, and you have to find it yourself.
Founded 2013, closed 2025
How Casetext went from free case law to gone
The arc matters because it explains why the shutdown landed so hard on solos and small firms specifically. Casetext was not a general-purpose tool that happened to be cheap. It was built for the people who could not buy Westlaw, and for twelve years it was the answer everyone gave them.
Casetext founded
Started by Jake Heller, a former Ropes and Gray litigator, on the premise that case law should be free to read and that the annotations lawyers add while reading are the valuable part. It opened its case law database to the public at no charge, which is why so many Casetext links ended up in briefs, memos and CLE handouts.
CARA, Compose and SmartCite arrive
CARA let you upload a brief and get back relevant authority, which was genuinely new at the time. Compose drafted motion sections from a library of standard arguments. SmartCite was the citator, flagging negative treatment. Together they made Casetext the default recommendation for solos and small firms who could not justify Westlaw.
Thomson Reuters buys Casetext for 650 million dollars
Announced June 2023 and completed in August, all cash. Thomson Reuters said publicly it was buying CoCounsel, the AI assistant Casetext had launched on GPT-4 earlier that year. The research database and the self-serve subscription came along with it.
Casetext shuts down on 1 April
Less than two years after the acquisition closed, the standalone product was retired. Subscribers lost CARA, Compose, SmartCite and the free public case law archive. There was no self-serve successor at a comparable price, and no export path out of SmartCite.
CoCounsel Legal becomes the successor
Thomson Reuters relaunched the technology as CoCounsel Legal in August 2025, sold in tiers inside the Westlaw ecosystem. CoCounsel Legal contains full Westlaw Advantage, and Advantage sold on its own publishes 256.75 dollars per user per month for a single circuit, so that figure is the floor under any CoCounsel quote.
The domain is wound down
Checked on 19 August 2026, casetext.com serves HTTP 410 Gone on every path, including robots.txt and sitemap.xml. The archive is not merely offline. It is being actively removed from search indexes.
One more thing is worth recording, because it is unusual. The shutdown drew an organized public objection, including a petition arguing that closing Casetext concentrated access to legal information in fewer hands. It did not change the outcome. But it is a reasonable summary of the concern: a free, searchable copy of American case law disappeared into a paid product, and the free copy is the part that is now returning 410.
Published and reported never share a column
What Casetext cost, and what the replacement costs
This is the part former subscribers care about most, and it is where the numbers get slippery, because the successor does not publish any. We split every claim into what a vendor states on its own site and what buyers report. The two never get merged into a single figure, because merging them is how a rumor becomes a fact.
| Question | Published by the vendor | Reported by buyers |
|---|---|---|
| What did Casetext cost before it closed? | Casetext sold self-serve at roughly 65 to 100 dollars per seat per month depending on tier, with the case law database itself free to read without a subscription. | Nothing to report. This one was published on the vendor's own page while the product existed, which is precisely why its disappearance stung. |
| What does CoCounsel Legal cost now? | No rate. legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/cocounsel-legal returns HTTP 200 but its pricing path returns HTTP 404. Every CoCounsel configuration is quoted individually. | Small-firm figures circulating in the market start around 225 dollars per user per month and climb with the Westlaw bundle. Treat that as a buyer estimate, not a rate card. |
| Is there a hard floor under a CoCounsel quote? | Yes, and it is the one genuinely useful published number in this market. CoCounsel Legal contains full Westlaw Advantage, and Advantage sold alone publishes 256.75 dollars per user per month for a single circuit and 399.75 for all states plus federal, for firms of ten attorneys or fewer. | Nothing needed. Work upward from the Advantage rate and you will not be surprised by the first quote you receive. |
| Was there a refund for the unused term? | Thomson Reuters published no blanket refund policy for the shutdown. Handling was per account, through Thomson Reuters support rather than through Casetext. | Former subscribers describe a range of outcomes, from prorated credit to migration offers onto CoCounsel. Since casetext.com no longer serves a sign-in page, any account question now has to start at Thomson Reuters support. |
The short version: a published price became a quote. That is the structural change, and it is bigger than the number itself. A solo could buy Casetext with a credit card on a Tuesday afternoon. Buying its successor means a conversation with a sales team, a scoped quote and, in most configurations, a Westlaw subscription underneath it. We work through the whole market in our legal research pricing comparison, and the CoCounsel detail sits in how much does CoCounsel cost.
Including where we lose
Where former Casetext subscribers actually go
There is no single replacement, because Casetext was three products in one wrapper: a free case law archive, a brief-analysis tool and a citator. Work out which of the three you actually used every week, and the choice gets much easier. Most people find they used one of them and assumed they needed all three.
| Option | Best for | Where it wins | Where it does not |
|---|---|---|---|
| CoCounsel Legal | Firms that want the Casetext technology and can absorb Westlaw-tier pricing. | It is literally the same engineering team's work, now with Westlaw's editorial layer, KeyCite and the Key Number System behind it. Nothing else on this list has that. | No published price, quote-only, and it contains a Westlaw subscription whose own published floor is 256.75 per user per month. That is a different order of spend from a 65 dollar Casetext seat. |
| Fastcase Library through your bar | Any US lawyer with a bar membership, which is most of them. | Effectively free. Your bar dues already paid for it, coverage of US primary law is solid, and it includes the Cert Citator. If you are not using it, you are leaving money on the table. | Access is provisioned by your bar, so you have to start at your bar portal. The AI assistant, Vincent, is usually not included in the benefit, only discounted. |
| CourtListener and govinfo | Anyone who mainly needs to read a specific opinion they already know about. | Free, public, and they hold the federal opinions Casetext used to give away. RECAP pulls in docket material. No subscription, no quote, no sales call. | They are archives, not research tools. No plain-English search, no citator, no negative-treatment flags. Coverage of state trial courts is thin. |
| Cases | Solos and small firms who want the Casetext price point and a search that understands a sentence. | Published at 29 dollars per user per month with the number on the page, no quote and no multi-year term. Ask in plain English, get on-point federal and state precedents with the holding and a citation you can open. | We have no citator. We will not tell you whether a case is still good law, and we say so on every page. For that you still need KeyCite, Shepard's, BCite or Cert Citator. |
Two honest notes on that table. We have no citator, which is a real gap if SmartCite was the feature you relied on, and no amount of plain-English search substitutes for a negative-treatment flag. And your bar association's Fastcase benefit is free money that a surprising number of lawyers never switch on, so check that before you buy anything at all. We wrote up what that benefit does and does not include on our Fastcase page.
If the part you miss is simply typing a question the way you would say it and getting back the cases that answer it, with the holding and a citation you can open, that is the job we built for. There is a step-by-step version of the move in how to switch from Casetext, and the fuller background in Casetext shut down: what it means for your firm.
True of every tool on this page
Whatever you switch to, open the case
Casetext launched CoCounsel on GPT-4 in 2023 and effectively started this whole market. Every product on this page now has a generative layer, and every generative layer can produce a citation that does not exist. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database, which counts only decisions where a court explicitly found or clearly implied reliance on hallucinated material, listed 1,934 cases at its 19 August 2026 update. It held 719 in January 2026. That is the growth rate of a problem no vendor has solved with a feature.
The 2026 US sanctions record is consistent about where responsibility lands. Courts have not sanctioned anyone for using AI. They have sanctioned filings nobody read. In Whiting v. City of Athens, Tennessee, the Sixth Circuit imposed appellees' fees, double costs and 15,000 dollars in punitive sanctions each under Rule 38 over a brief containing more than two dozen fabricated citations. What separated that from a bare reprimand elsewhere was what counsel did once the problem surfaced.
There is a sharper version of this point now that Casetext links return 410. A citation that resolves to a dead page is not verified, it is unverifiable, and a brief full of them looks exactly like a brief full of fabricated ones. If you are refreshing old work product, re-check every Casetext link in it against a source you can still open. We set out the workflow in can lawyers use AI for legal research, and the sanctions detail sits in AI hallucinations in legal cases.
What people actually search for
Casetext, answered
What happened to Casetext?
Thomson Reuters shut it down on 1 April 2025, less than two years after buying it for 650 million dollars in August 2023. The technology was relaunched as CoCounsel Legal inside the Westlaw product line in August 2025. Subscribers lost CARA, Compose, SmartCite and the free public case law archive with no self-serve successor at a comparable price. Checked on 19 August 2026, casetext.com returns HTTP 410 Gone on every URL.
Does Casetext still exist?
No. The company was absorbed into Thomson Reuters and the product was retired on 1 April 2025. The brand survives only as a footnote in CoCounsel marketing. The domain is being wound down: casetext.com serves HTTP 410 Gone on every path we tested, including robots.txt and a URL that never existed, which confirms a blanket rule rather than a partial cleanup.
Is Casetext shut down?
Yes, permanently, since 1 April 2025. This is not an outage and it will not come back. The clearest proof is the status code: casetext.com answers HTTP 410 Gone rather than a 404 or a redirect. A 404 leaves room for the page to return. A 410 is a deliberate instruction to search engines that the resource is permanently removed, and Thomson Reuters is serving it site-wide.
How do I log in to Casetext?
You cannot. There is no working Casetext sign-in any more. casetext.com/login returns HTTP 403 behind a Cloudflare challenge page titled "Just a moment...", and there is no successor login on that domain. If you need account, billing or refund history, contact Thomson Reuters support directly, because Casetext no longer has a support desk of its own. If your subscription was migrated, you sign in to CoCounsel or Westlaw instead.
Why do my old Casetext links not work?
Because every one of them now returns HTTP 410 Gone. That includes case law permalinks, so any Casetext citation you pasted into a brief, a memo, a client email or a CLE handout is dead, and so is every Casetext link in every blog post and law school guide on the internet. There is no redirect to an equivalent page. To find the case again, search the citation on CourtListener, govinfo, your bar's Fastcase benefit, or here.
What replaced Casetext?
CoCounsel Legal, launched by Thomson Reuters in August 2025 and sold in per-user tiers inside the Westlaw ecosystem. It is built on Casetext's own technology. The practical difference is the commercial model: Casetext was self-serve with a published price around 65 to 100 dollars a seat, and CoCounsel Legal is quote-only, with its own product page carrying no rate and its pricing path returning a 404.
What is Casetext CoCounsel?
CoCounsel was the AI legal assistant Casetext launched in 2023 on GPT-4, and it was the reason Thomson Reuters paid 650 million dollars for the company. It could review documents, summarize depositions, prepare deposition outlines and search a database in plain language. It now exists as CoCounsel Legal, a Thomson Reuters product. The name "Casetext CoCounsel" describes a product that no longer ships under that combined brand.
How much does CoCounsel cost compared to Casetext?
Casetext published roughly 65 to 100 dollars per seat per month. CoCounsel Legal publishes nothing: its pricing URL returns a 404. There is a useful floor, though. CoCounsel Legal contains full Westlaw Advantage, and Advantage sold on its own publishes 256.75 dollars per user per month for a single circuit. Reported small-firm CoCounsel figures start around 225 and rise with the bundle, so budget for several times what Casetext cost.
What was CARA in Casetext?
CARA was Casetext's brief-analysis tool. You uploaded a document, typically an opponent's brief or your own draft, and it returned relevant authority the document did not cite, using the context of the filing rather than keywords. It was the feature most former subscribers say they miss. Its capability lives on inside CoCounsel, but not as a standalone product you can buy on its own.
What happened to SmartCite?
It shut down with the rest of Casetext on 1 April 2025 and there is no export path. SmartCite was the citator, flagging whether a case had been treated negatively by later courts. If you relied on it, you now need KeyCite through Westlaw, Shepard's through LexisNexis, BCite through Bloomberg Law, or Cert Citator through your bar association's Fastcase benefit. We do not offer a citator and we do not pretend to.
Is Casetext free now?
No. It is not free, not paid, and not available. The free public case law archive that made Casetext popular went dark with everything else on 1 April 2025 and its pages now return HTTP 410. For free US case law today, CourtListener and govinfo hold federal opinions at no cost, and PACER waives fees at or below 30 dollars a quarter with written opinions always free.
Was Casetext acquired by Westlaw?
By Thomson Reuters, which owns Westlaw. The 650 million dollar all-cash acquisition was announced in June 2023 and completed in August 2023. Casetext was folded into the Thomson Reuters legal business, and the dead casetext.com pages now point readers at Westlaw for research and CoCounsel for legal AI. So the informal phrasing is close enough: the company that owns Westlaw bought Casetext, then closed it.
What is the best Casetext replacement?
It depends on which part of Casetext you actually used. If it was CARA and document review, CoCounsel Legal is the direct descendant, at a quote-only price several times higher. If it was the free case law archive, CourtListener and your bar's Fastcase benefit cover most of it for nothing. If it was cheap plain-English search that hands you a citation, that is the gap we built for, published at 29 dollars per user per month.
Do I still need to verify citations after switching tools?
Yes, on every platform including ours. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database, which counts only decisions where a court explicitly found or clearly implied reliance on hallucinated material, listed 1,934 cases at its 19 August 2026 update, against 719 in January 2026. Courts have not sanctioned lawyers for using AI. They have sanctioned filings nobody read. Open the case and read the passage you are relying on.
Keep researching
The Casetext price point, still on the page
Ask your question in plain English and get on-point US federal and state precedents with the holding and a real citation. Published at 29 dollars per month, no quote, no multi-year term. Informational research, not legal advice, always verify the citation.