Thomson Reuters v ROSS: What Might Those Tantalizing Redactions in TR’s Brief Conceal?

Earlier today, I wrote about the brief filed by Thomson Reuters in its ongoing copyright litigation against the now-closed legal research startup ROSS Intelligence, which is now on an interlocutory appeal to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Like many of the documents that have been filed in this case since it began in 2020, the brief contains numerous redactions. But some of the redactions in this latest filing are particularly tantalizing — or frustrating — for what they suggest but do not reveal.

For example, when ROSS shut down operations in December 2020, it expressly blamed TR’s lawsuit, saying that the litigation had crippled its ability to raise new financing or explore potential acquisition. Insurance coverage, it said, would enable it to continue to fight the lawsuit.

But the redacted footnote you see here suggests ROSS’s own executives admitted something that would tell a different story — that it was not the lawsuit that forced it to close its doors, but some other “reality.”

What follows are some of the other tantalizing redactions in the brief.

The problem is what?? How can a statement of the problem be subject to redaction? The redaction seems to relate to ROSS’s claim of “faster and more accurate” responses to legal research. 

OK, some key details left out here. “When ROSS asked its” … its what — and to do what? The context seems to suggest that after TR turned down ROSS’s request for a Westlaw subscription, ROSS turned to someone else. Of course, we know eventually that “someone else” was LegalEase, but what about in the interim. 

What did Arruda admit and van der Heijden confirm? Andrew Arruda was the CEO and cofounder of ROSS, and Tomas van der Heijden was the head of product and legal.

Based on the context, this appears to be something  that describes some part of how Westlaw creates headnotes. TOP SECRET!

Should we read this to suggest ROSS was trying to block its other competitors from getting access to the materials it had LegalEase develop? i suppose there is some irony in that.

Wait, did ROSS get someone else, before LegalEase, to access the Westlaw materials? I don’t recall ever reading that before. If so, who was it?

Oh c’mon, you can tell us what ROSS’s own expert admitted! In the context following the citation to a case where the company had not “sought to avoid performing its own work,” did ROSS’s expert admit otherwise? 

“The copying was so extensive that it [REDACTED].” How. Extensive. Was. It?

Don’t you want to know what ROSS’s own AI expert said about this? Of course you do.

Maybe someday, the full story will come out.