Pablo Arredondo, the co-founder of Casetext and one of the most prominent figures in legal AI, is joining practice management company Clio in a newly created senior role.
Arredondo will serve as senior vice president, judiciary, leading Clio’s strategy for extending its technology into the court system.
The appointment marks a significant shift in focus for Arredondo, whose career to date has centred on building AI tools for legal practitioners rather than the courts themselves.
He co-founded Casetext in 2013, where he helped develop CARA, widely regarded as the first AI-powered brief analyser, transforming how lawyers approached legal research.
He also played a central role in building CoCounsel, the product credited with bringing generative AI into everyday legal workflows at scale across the profession.
Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext for $650 million in 2023, with Arredondo remaining at the company before departing at the end of last year.
Arredondo has pointed to the sheer volume of material entering the court system as the defining challenge his new role will seek to address.
“On Monday, somewhere on the order of three billion tokens are going to hit court dockets,” he said, illustrating the scale of the problem facing courts on a routine basis.
He has also described the need for what he calls “judiciary grade” technology, arguing that tools built for lawyers are not suitable for the distinct demands of the court environment.
Arredondo noted that AI is already driving a surge in pro se filings, with more individuals representing themselves in court partly as a result of increased access to AI-powered legal assistance.
His interest in the judiciary was partly shaped by watching judges organically adopt Casetext’s Parallel Search, observing first-hand how courts were beginning to engage with AI tools.
A recent project at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute further deepened that focus, using large language models to annotate the U.S. Code of Conduct for Judges with centuries of judicial ethics thinking from rabbinic, Islamic and Roman Catholic traditions.
On the question of whether AI could ever replace judges, Arredondo’s position is unambiguous, offering a short answer of “absolutely not” when pressed on the subject.
He is scheduled to officially begin his new role at Clio on 31 August, at which point the company’s push into the courts market will formally get underway.