Want to work smarter, save time, and make your practice more profitable as a Florida lawyer? In an era where artificial intelligence is transforming legal practice, vLex is leading the charge in empowering small law firms and solo practitioners with an AI-driven platform and curated legal workflows built with legal professionals in mind.

We're excited to share that vLex's Customer Success Manager, Alex Shaffer, recently joined The Florida Bar's LegalFuel Podcast, hosted by Christine Bilbrey, Director of the Practice Resource Center, and Jamie Moore, Practice Management Advisor.

During the podcast, Alex provided valuable insights on the upgraded platform for Florida Bar members, including how they can now take advantage of free AI generated case summaries and headnotes, how to get access to a free trial of Vincent AI, and practical tips for leveraging the platform to transform their practice. Listen to the full episode here:

Beyond the Basics: How vLex Fastcase Transforms Legal Service Delivery

*This podcast has been approved by The Florida Bar Continuing Legal Education Department for 1.0 hour of General CLE credit including 1.0 hour of Technology CLE credit.

The Evolution from Fastcase 7 to vLex Fastcase

To kick off the podcast, Christine addressed the elephant in the room for many Florida attorneys: the transition from Fastcase 7 to vLex Fastcase.

The merger between vLex and Fastcase has brought significant enhancements while maintaining continuity for existing Florida Bar members. As Alex highlighted, there are important similarities between both platforms, and chief among them is that the “actual content, or beating heart, of the research platform is going to be identical.” The “biggest change” according to Alex is the enhanced “functionality, the speed, and the reliability and availability of resources.”

Along with the same great content Florida lawyers expect from Fastcase, they now have access to technical advances within vLex connected to the searching and tracking of content. For example, Florida lawyers can now “utilize plain language searching to search for cases, statutory content, regulatory content, and secondary materials,” but they can also use “the same boolean terms and connectors [they] may have been familiar with from Fastcase.”

And for users who prefer a more structured approach, "on the left-hand side of the page where we offer an advanced search option... you're able to select your jurisdiction, specify your content set, and then utilize a bit more of a plug-and-play approach to building search queries."

How Florida Bar Members can Access vLex Fastcase

With only a couple of clicks, Florida Bar members can access vLex Fastcase directly from The Florida Bar’s website. For quick instructions, Alex shared that Florida Bar members can go to floridabar.org, then under the “Members” dropdown, click the “Benefits / Discounts” section, and then scroll down to the “Featured Programs” section where vLex Fastcase is listed.

“For all the members who don't know how to log into their member portal, you're missing out,” said Christine. She then transitioned from how to login and asked Alex to “walk us through the vLex Resource Center and recommend some steps to customize it effectively.”

“Whenever you log in for the very first time,” responded Alex, “there are going to be two different resources that I would recommend you explore. The first of which will be the Resource Center, which is available about halfway down the left-hand side of the page under the Help menu. Then under there, there's going to be a tab that says Knowledge Base, and this will guide you to our Knowledge Base that houses information on navigating the platform at a simple level, but also very in-depth guides as to certain features.”

“One of the things I like to shout from the mountaintops,” exclaimed Alex, “is that I recommend users check out our articles on Cert, which is our recently introduced in-house case citator. It's a human editorial-led effort, and it's a really great way for folks that may be coming from other platforms as well that are familiar with the systems utilized elsewhere, such as Shepherds or Keysight, to get familiar with those treatment signals that you would see inside of vLex.”

The other great resource Alex recommended for Florida Bar members is the “Get Started” bubble in the lower right hand corner, which gives you a step-by-step overview of the platform. “It's very much a guided tour,” explained Alex, and it “will take you through the account settings, emphasizing the best search methods, the results pages, how documents are displayed inside of vLex, and how to also set up vLex Cloud. At the bottom of that page is going to be links back to the Knowledge Base that I mentioned earlier, alongside some contact information for training sessions, our general email, phone, and in-app chat to contact our support team.”

Vincent AI: Transforming Legal Service Delivery

“So we have to address Vincent AI,” said Christine. “It's living in there, but I want to specify that it is not free. It is discounted for our members. We've done a whole podcast with Damien Riehl about Vincent. I love Vincent AI. This is coming. A lot of attorneys are excited about it. Some of them are afraid of it. Because it lives inside of vLex, can you tell listeners what is Vincent AI?”

“Absolutely,” answered Alex, “Vincent AI was one of the earliest instances of artificial intelligence in the legal research marketplace… When the initial iteration was introduced, it was analyzing users' documents to look at the cited authorities, and then finding relevant authorities that may be missing or similar functions to that. Now, obviously this all changed quite a bit with the explosion of large-language models from OpenAI, from Google, from Anthropic and others, and that's led to the latest iterations of Vincent AI that you would see in the app today.”

“But before I discuss the Research Assistant component of Vincent,” Alex pointed out “that Florida Bar members, regardless of whether they pay any additional subscription fee, will have access to the case analysis portion of Vincent,” which exists inside of cases whenever you open them.

“At the top of the page,” Alex went on to share, “there will be a little bubble that says, ‘powered by Vincent AI,’ which will provide an AI sourced case summary, some AI generated headnotes, and topics that are inside of that case. It's a great way to accelerate that process of reviewing authorities as you're going through your case results when traditionally performing research.”

From Alex’s perspective, Vincent lets you “jump to the parts of lawyering that actually require the lawyer and require that creativity, that judgment, that insight, and that problem-solving. So for example, one of the workflows that we have inside of Vincent is known as Analyze a Complaint.”

Imagine, suggested Alex, “if you're defense counsel, for instance, you can take your complaint and upload it directly to Vincent. Vincent will then read through that complaint, analyze to confirm, yes, this is a complaint, not a motion, not a merger agreement or something else and also analyze the content inside of that complaint to start recommending some research queries it can help you with.”

“So if you would think of the conventional workflow,” said Alex “I'm defense counsel, a complaint comes across my desk or a client comes to my office and shares the complaint or says that they were sued. I then look at that complaint to pull out the claims, pull out the defenses, and then start some research into those defenses.”

“I can go ahead and streamline that all using Vincent AI,” said Alex, “by having it pull out each of those claims alongside the authority that we're citing to support those claims, to then build a timeline of the alleged facts in that complaint, and then to jump into research that's looking to the vetted authorities inside of the vLex Fastcase database, to then verify the different claims that opposing counsel presented or to propose potential defenses in legal arguments that I could then explore when I'm going to draft my answer. And that's just one example of a workflow inside of Vincent.”

Alex also spotlighted that, “there is not just a discount available for Florida Bar members, but there's also a free trial if you'd like to kick the tires for yourself to see how it performs and see if it would be a good fit for accelerating some of your workflows.”

As Christine observed, "It's amazing how it's like you have a whole team of associates working for you and now you just have to supervise the work that's been done."

Ready to Transform Your Legal Practice?

We're incredibly grateful to The Florida Bar's LegalFuel Podcast and Christine Bilbrey and Jamie Moore for hosting Alex for this comprehensive discussion about how the vLex Fastcase platform is empowering Florida lawyers to work smarter and provide better service delivery to their clients.

Are you a Florida Bar member? Access vLex Fastcase for free through The Florida Bar member portal and take advantage of the same AI-driven platform trusted by law schools, corporations, governments, and the largest law firms in the world. Login here.

Authored By

Jeff Cox