Case Text's 8-Prompt Exit

Jack Smith shares a story about Case Text's surprising $750M acquisition by LexisNexis, which was primarily based on their AI prompts.

"People were talking about this business Case Text that just got acquired by LexisNexis for $750 million. In the investor report, it's kind of embarrassing, but LexisNexis said the reason we paid $700 million for this business is because they came up with 8 prompts for OpenAI about how to make it give good responses to law questions.

They're kind of openly saying this business is just a layer on top of OpenAI - they just came up with 8 prompt texts, and so we're buying them for 700 million. Someone in the industry said LexisNexis' competitor had just come out with some AI thing, and LexisNexis was like 'oh shit, we need to get up to speed fast' and so they just paid this ludicrous sum because they needed to get up to speed."

Note: Shaan later clarified that Case Text had been around for 10 years and had 10,000 law firms using them, so it wasn't literally just 8 prompts, but the AI capability was a major driver of the acquisition value.