Fastcase Login, Fastcase Legal Research and What Happened to Casemaker
Fastcase is now part of Clio, through vLex. Its own pricing page redirects to a URL that returns a 404, and the Casemaker domain no longer leads to a research platform at all. Every claim below was read from the vendors' own URLs on 17 August 2026. If you just need a case with a citation you can open, 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
Fastcase is a US legal research service that most American lawyers get free through their bar association, and it is now owned by Clio, which acquired vLex in November 2025. To log in, start at your bar association portal rather than at fastcase.com, because bar access is provisioned by the bar. Casemaker merged into Fastcase at the end of 2020 and no longer exists: its old domain now redirects to an unrelated third-party site, so retire that bookmark. Fastcase publishes no price for paid tiers, and its own pricing URL redirects to a page that returns a 404. The citator is currently called Cert Citator, the fourth name this feature has carried. All URLs verified 17 August 2026. Informational research, not legal advice, and always verify the citation.
Last updated August 2026
Checked, not remembered
What happened to Fastcase
Fastcase has changed hands three times in five years, and most write-ups you find describe a company that no longer exists in that form. So rather than repeat the history from memory, we asked the vendors' own URLs what they do today. A redirect is the hardest evidence available about a product's status, it costs nothing to check, and almost nobody bothers.
| What you are asking about | Status today | How we know |
|---|---|---|
| The Fastcase marketing site | Live, and it tells you who owns it now. | fastcase.com returns HTTP 200 under the title "Fastcase, Beyond Research", and carries the banner "Fastcase is now part of Clio." The footer copyright still reads 2024, two years stale, which is a fair signal of how actively the site is maintained. |
| The Fastcase pricing page | Redirects into a page that does not exist. | fastcase.com/pricing returns HTTP 301 to law.vlex.com/fastcaseisvlex, and that destination returns HTTP 404. The redirect carries the campaign tag fc7_retail_migration_april_2025, which dates the retail migration itself. |
| The Fastcase login | Alive, on its own host. Your bookmark works. | fastcase.com/login returns HTTP 301 to gateway.fastcase.com/login, carrying the parameter to=fc7 for Fastcase 7. That gateway returns HTTP 200. Of every Fastcase URL we checked, the login is the one that still does its job. |
| The legacy Fastcase research app | Gone. It sends you back to marketing. | apps.fastcase.com returns HTTP 302 to /Research/, which then returns HTTP 301 all the way back to the fastcase.com homepage. The old application host no longer takes you to an application. |
| The Casemaker domain | No longer a legal research site at all. | casemaker.us and www.casemaker.us both return HTTP 302 to survey-smiles.com, a third-party site unrelated to legal research. If you still have a Casemaker bookmark from your bar association, it does not lead to a research platform any more. Do not enter bar credentials there. |
| The current product page | Fastcase Library, hosted by vLex. | vlex.com/fastcase returns HTTP 302 to /fastcase-library, which returns HTTP 200 under the title "Fastcase Library | vLex (Part of Clio)". That page names three capabilities: AI Case Analysis, Cert Citator and Comprehensive Coverage. |
| A published vLex rate | None. | vlex.com/pricing returns HTTP 404. Neither fastcase.com nor vlex.com states a per-seat figure anywhere. The only actions offered to a prospect are "Book a demo" and "Start a free trial". |
All rows read directly from fastcase.com, apps.fastcase.com, gateway.fastcase.com, casemaker.us and vlex.com on 17 August 2026. Vendor sites change without notice, so re-check before relying on any of it.
Read those rows together and a pattern shows up that the press releases do not mention. The marketing site is live but its copyright line is two years old. The pricing link points at a page that was deleted. The old application host sends researchers back to a brochure. The Casemaker domain has left the legal industry entirely. The one URL still doing exactly what a user expects is the login gateway.
That is what a product looks like mid-migration rather than a product in trouble. Fastcase itself is very much alive, and for most US lawyers it remains the best-value research access they have. But the surface a searcher hits has been left behind by four ownership changes, which is precisely why so many people end up typing "is Fastcase down" or "who owns Fastcase" into a search box. We saw the same pattern at Thomson Reuters, where the retired name still answers on its old host, documented on our WestlawNext page, and at LexisNexis on our Lexis Advance page. Legal research vendors rename and resell their products far faster than they migrate their infrastructure.
Start at your bar, not at the vendor
How to log in to Fastcase
There are two different doors, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason a valid Fastcase account appears to be broken. Which door you use depends on who pays for your access, not on which URL you happen to remember.
If your bar association provides it
Sign in to your bar association's own member site first, then follow its Fastcase or legal research link. The bar authenticates you and passes you through. Going straight to fastcase.com and typing your bar credentials will usually fail, because Fastcase has no way to know which of eighty-plus bars you belong to. This applies whether your bar is the Illinois State Bar, the Florida Bar, the State Bar of Georgia, the DC Bar, the Washington State Bar or any other.
If you subscribe directly
Use fastcase.com/login, which redirects to gateway.fastcase.com carrying the Fastcase 7 product parameter, or click Fastcase 7 Login in the site header. Both land in the same gateway, which returned HTTP 200 when we checked it on 17 August 2026. Paid vLex accounts may sign in on vlex.com instead, depending on which tier was sold to you.
If your old bookmark fails
Two legacy addresses no longer work as people expect. apps.fastcase.com, the old research application host, now redirects back to the marketing homepage. casemaker.us redirects off the legal industry altogether. Neither means your subscription lapsed, and neither is somewhere to type a password. Delete both bookmarks and start from your bar portal.
One practical note about the bar route, because it decides who you need to call. If sign-in fails on your bar association's site, that is a bar membership problem and the bar can fix it. If you get through the bar and then Fastcase itself errors, that is a vendor problem. Working out which side of the handoff broke takes about ten seconds and saves a long call to the wrong support desk.
Four owners in five years
Who owns Fastcase now, and how it got there
If a colleague describes a Fastcase that does not match yours, or insists the product is called something else, this table usually settles it. Dates and deal values below are drawn from contemporaneous trade reporting, and we flag which claims are reported rather than verified on a vendor page.
| Year | What happened | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 | Fastcase founded | Built as a low-cost alternative to Westlaw and LexisNexis, and sold largely through bar associations rather than to firms directly. |
| 2021 | Casemaker merges into Fastcase | Announced 5 January 2021, with the companies merging on the last day of 2020 under the Fastcase name. Reported at the time by the ABA Journal and LawSites. Casemaker brought its CaseCheck+ citator and statutory updating; Fastcase brought Docket Alarm, NextChapter and Law Street Media. |
| 2023 | vLex and Fastcase merge | Announced April 2023, backed by Oakley Capital and Bain Capital Credit, combining a US bar-association business with a large international library. |
| 2025 | Clio acquires vLex | Reported at roughly 1 billion dollars and completed 10 November 2025, backed by a Series G that reportedly valued Clio at about 5 billion. Fastcase became part of a practice-management company rather than a standalone research company. |
| 2026 | Fastcase and Alexi in litigation | Fastcase sued competitor Alexi in December 2025, and Alexi filed counterclaims in January 2026 alleging the merger created an unlawful clog on competition. Reported by LawSites and Artificial Lawyer. The allegations on both sides are unproven. |
The 2025 acquisition is the one worth thinking about if you are choosing tools for a firm. Fastcase spent twenty-five years as an independent research company selling primarily to bar associations. It is now a research library inside a practice-management business, and the strategic logic of that combination is about the workflow around the research rather than the research itself. Nothing about your bar benefit changed on the day the deal closed, but the roadmap now belongs to a company whose main product is not a research platform.
One feature, four names
Does Fastcase have a citator?
Yes, and the reason people keep asking is that it has been renamed at every ownership change. A guide written in 2015, one written in 2021 and the current vendor page will each give you a different answer, and all three are describing the same job: telling you whether the case you are about to cite is still good law.
| Name | Whose, and when | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Authority Check | Fastcase | The original Fastcase citing-references tool. It showed you how often and where a case had been cited, but it did not tell you whether the case was still good law. |
| Bad Law Bot | Fastcase, 2013 | An enhancement to Authority Check that flagged negative treatment automatically, by reading citation signals in later opinions rather than by employing editors to classify them. |
| CaseCheck+ | Casemaker | Casemaker's separate negative-history product, historically sold as a paid add-on rather than included in the base bar benefit. It arrived inside Fastcase through the 2021 merger. |
| Cert Citator | vLex, current | The name on the Fastcase Library page today, verified 17 August 2026. vLex describes it as revealing when cases have been overturned or criticized. It is the fourth name this capability has carried in the same product lineage. |
A word on how much weight any citator can carry, because this is not a Fastcase-specific caveat. Paul Hellyer's study in the Law Library Journal, volume 110 (2018), reviewed 357 citing relationships and found that Shepard's and KeyCite each missed or mislabeled roughly one third of negative citing relationships, and BCite more than two thirds. Those are the two most expensive citators in the market. A citator flag is a prompt to go and read the later opinion, not a substitute for reading it. We compare the major ones in KeyCite vs Shepard's.
We should be equally direct about our own position. Cases has no citator, and this is the row where Fastcase beats us outright. If your bar funds Fastcase, you already have Cert Citator and you should use it. What we do is a narrower job: turn a plain-English question into on-point US federal and state cases with the holding and a citation you can open. Those two things sit together perfectly well, and for most bar members the sensible setup is to keep the free benefit and add a targeted tool rather than replace one with the other.
Published and reported, never merged
How much does Fastcase cost?
The honest headline is that for most US lawyers Fastcase costs nothing beyond bar dues, and for everyone else there is no published rate to quote. We split every claim into what a vendor states on its own site and what buyers report, because merging those two columns is how bad pricing information spreads.
| Question | Published by the vendor | Reported by buyers (estimate) |
|---|---|---|
| What does Fastcase cost a bar association member? | Usually nothing extra. Fastcase states it partners with over 80 national, state and county bar associations to provide legal research as a free member benefit. Your bar dues pay for it. | What the benefit includes varies by bar. Some bars fund a wider tier than others, which is why two lawyers in different states describe Fastcase very differently. |
| What does Fastcase cost if you buy it directly? | No rate is published. fastcase.com/pricing redirects to a vLex page that returns a 404, and vlex.com/pricing returns a 404 as well. | Figures for the paid vLex tiers circulate in the region of 65 to 70 dollars per user per month, with a firm-level figure around 399. Treat these as buyer estimates, not a rate card. |
| Is Vincent AI included in the bar benefit? | vLex has stated that the bar-association member benefit is valued at "995 dollars or more annually". The benefit is the library. | Vincent AI is generally offered to bar members at a discount rather than included. Confirm with your own bar before assuming you have it, because this is the single most common misunderstanding about the benefit. |
| Is there a free trial? | The Fastcase Library page offers "Start a free trial", but states no length on the page as of 17 August 2026. | For context, the vendors that do publish a term are Westlaw at 7 days, Bloomberg Law at 14, LexisNexis at 2 on Lexis+ with Protege, and midpage at two weeks. |
| What happens at renewal? | Nothing published. Both direct tiers are quoted individually. | Renewal uplift is the most common complaint across this market generally. If you buy a paid tier, get a renewal cap in writing before you sign rather than after. |
The detail that catches people out is the gap between the library and the assistant. vLex has publicly valued the bar-association member benefit at 995 dollars or more annually, and that benefit is the research library. Vincent AI, the generative assistant, is generally offered to bar members at a discount rather than bundled in. Plenty of lawyers assume their bar gave them Vincent and discover otherwise at the point they try to use it, so confirm with your own bar before you plan work around it. The full market sits side by side in our legal research pricing comparison.
Where each one actually wins
Fastcase and Cases, side by side
This is not a table designed to make us win. Fastcase takes four of the eight rows outright, including the two that matter most to a working lawyer: it costs nothing if your bar funds it, and it has a citator. We have written it that way because a comparison that concedes nothing is worth nothing.
| What you are comparing | Fastcase (vLex, part of Clio) | Cases | Who wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to a bar member | Typically zero. Included in bar dues at over 80 associations, which is genuinely hard to beat. | 29 dollars per user per month, published on the page. | Fastcase, clearly |
| Citator | Cert Citator, included in the Fastcase Library. A real citator with negative-treatment flags. | None, and we say so on every page. | Fastcase, clearly |
| Breadth of content | US federal and state case law, statutes, regulations and court rules, plus a large international library through vLex and bar deskbooks. | US federal and state case law. Nothing else. | Fastcase, clearly |
| Dockets | Docket Alarm is in the same family, which no low-cost competitor matches. | No docket coverage. | Fastcase, clearly |
| Pricing transparency | None for paid tiers. The pricing URL redirects to a 404 and vLex publishes no rate. | 29 dollars per user per month, published, cancellable. | Cases |
| Naming and account stability | Four owners and four citator names in five years, with a dead pricing URL and an abandoned Casemaker domain. | One product, one name. | Cases |
| Plain-English question to answer | Boolean and keyword search first, with an AI layer added on top of a traditional research interface. | Ask the question as a sentence and read the on-point cases with the holding. | Cases |
| Who it fits | Any US lawyer whose bar funds it. For most practitioners this is the obvious first stop and it costs nothing. | Someone who wants a fast plain-English answer with a citation to open, alongside whatever their bar provides. | Different jobs, not a contest |
The practical reading is that these are not really competitors for the same slot. If you are a US lawyer with a bar membership, Fastcase is free money and you should be using it whatever else you buy. The question worth asking is narrower: when you have a question you would phrase as a sentence rather than as a Boolean string, and you want the on-point cases with the holding in front of you in under a minute, which tool do you reach for. That is the job we built for, at 29 dollars per user per month with the price on the page. More on how the wider market prices in our legal research platforms guide.
True of every platform on this page
Whatever you use, open the case
Fastcase Library has an AI layer, Vincent AI sits above it, and every generative layer in this market can produce a citation that does not exist. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database, which only counts decisions where a court explicitly found or clearly implied reliance on hallucinated material, listed 1,922 cases as of its 16 August 2026 update. It held 719 in January 2026. That is the growth rate of a problem nobody 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. The variable that separated that outcome from a bare reprimand elsewhere was what counsel did once the problem surfaced.
So the test for any tool, ours included, is not whether it can be wrong. It is how fast you can check. Ask whether the tool retrieves from an actual body of case law and hands you the citation to open, rather than composing an answer that sounds like one. 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
Fastcase, answered
Who owns Fastcase?
Clio, through vLex. Fastcase merged with vLex in 2023, and Clio completed its acquisition of vLex on 10 November 2025 in a deal reported at roughly 1 billion dollars. The Fastcase homepage states this directly with the banner "Fastcase is now part of Clio", and the current product page is titled "Fastcase Library | vLex (Part of Clio)". So the research tool your bar association provides is now owned by a practice-management company.
How do I log in to Fastcase?
Go to fastcase.com and use the Fastcase 7 Login link, or go to fastcase.com/login directly. Checked on 17 August 2026, that URL returns an HTTP 301 to gateway.fastcase.com/login carrying the parameter to=fc7, and the gateway returns HTTP 200. Most lawyers do not sign in there at all: if you get Fastcase as a bar member benefit, you normally start from your bar association website and are passed through automatically.
Why does my bar association login not work on fastcase.com?
Because bar association access is usually provisioned through your bar rather than through Fastcase. Your bar site holds the link that authenticates you, so signing in directly at fastcase.com with your bar credentials will often fail even though your access is perfectly valid. Start from your own bar association member portal instead. This is the single most common Fastcase access problem and it is not a fault with your subscription.
What happened to Casemaker?
It merged into Fastcase. The merger was announced on 5 January 2021, with the companies combining on the last day of 2020 under the Fastcase name, and Casemaker ceased to exist as a separate product. There is a practical warning attached: checked on 17 August 2026, casemaker.us returns an HTTP 302 to survey-smiles.com, a site unrelated to legal research. An old Casemaker bookmark no longer leads to a research platform, so do not enter bar credentials on whatever it now shows you.
Is Fastcase the same as vLex?
They are the same company now, but not quite the same product. Fastcase is the US bar-association research service and the brand most American lawyers know; vLex is the parent platform with a much larger international library. The current product name for the US service is Fastcase Library, delivered on vLex infrastructure. In practice you will see both names in your own account, which is why the question comes up so often.
Does Fastcase have a citator?
Yes. It is currently called Cert Citator, and vLex describes it as showing when a case has been overturned or criticized so you do not cite bad law. The naming history is why people get confused: the same capability has been called Authority Check, then Bad Law Bot from 2013, then CaseCheck+ on the Casemaker side, and now Cert Citator. If a colleague or a guide refers to any of those, they are describing the same function at a different point in time.
Does Fastcase have AI?
Yes. The Fastcase Library page names AI Case Analysis, which it describes as distilling opinions into legal issues, generating headnote-style summaries and extracting key paragraphs. Vincent AI is the more capable assistant in the same family, but it usually sits outside the free bar benefit and is offered to members at a discount instead. Check what your specific bar funds before assuming Vincent is included, because most bars fund the library and not the assistant.
Is Fastcase free?
For most US lawyers, effectively yes, because their bar association pays for it. Fastcase states it partners with over 80 national, state and county bar associations to provide legal research as a free member benefit, and bar coverage across the United States is close to universal. It is not free in the sense of an open public database: you need a qualifying bar membership, and the paid tiers above the benefit are quoted individually with no published rate.
How much does Fastcase cost?
There is no published price. fastcase.com/pricing returns an HTTP 301 to law.vlex.com/fastcaseisvlex, and that destination returns an HTTP 404, so the vendor's own pricing link leads to a page that does not exist. vlex.com/pricing returns a 404 as well. Reported buyer estimates for paid vLex tiers sit around 65 to 70 dollars per user per month with a firm figure near 399, but those are estimates rather than a rate card and should be treated that way.
Is Fastcase down?
Check whether you reach a sign-in page. On 17 August 2026, fastcase.com returned HTTP 200 and the login gateway returned HTTP 200, so the service itself was up. Two things routinely look like an outage but are not: apps.fastcase.com, the old research app host, now redirects back to the marketing homepage, and bar association access can fail if you start at fastcase.com rather than at your bar portal. Both are routing changes rather than downtime.
Fastcase vs Westlaw: which is better?
They are built for different budgets and the honest answer depends on whether you need the editorial layer. Westlaw has headnotes, the Key Number System, KeyCite, American Law Reports and analytics, built over decades and genuinely hard to replicate, and Westlaw Advantage publishes 256.75 dollars per user per month for a single circuit. Fastcase gives most US lawyers solid primary law and a citator for nothing beyond bar dues. If your work depends on the Key Number System, no low-cost tool substitutes for it. If it depends on finding on-point cases, Fastcase covers a great deal of that ground.
Fastcase vs LexisNexis: what is the difference?
Scale and price model. LexisNexis is a full research platform with Shepard's, Practical Guidance across 25 practice areas and the Protege generative layer, sold on individual quotes with no published rate and a 2 day trial on its top tier. Fastcase covers US primary law well and reaches most American lawyers free through their bar. The realistic comparison for a small firm is not Fastcase against LexisNexis but whether the bar benefit plus a cheap targeted tool covers the work you actually do.
Do I still need to verify citations from Fastcase?
Yes, and from every platform including ours. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database, which only counts decisions where a court explicitly found or clearly implied reliance on hallucinated material, listed 1,922 cases as of its 16 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, whatever tool surfaced it.
Keep researching
Case law research with the price 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.