The biggest deal of 2025 – in fact, the biggest deal ever in legal tech – was legal tech company Clio's acquisition of vLex for $1 billion. A global legal research company founded in Spain, vLex had, just two years earlier, merged with the U.S. legal research company Fastcase, and the union of those two companies – which also included the Docket Alarm trove of court docket data – had further accelerated the development of Vincent, vLex's generative AI technology.

Now, with Clio's acquisition of vLex, comes a combustible combination that has the potential to unify the fuel of all that vLex legal research and docket data with Clio's cloud practice management technology to create an unprecedented, AI-driven platform that unifies both the business and practice of law.

Against this backdrop, I sat down with Ed Walters, the founder and CEO of Fastcase, during ClioCon in October, to discuss the acquisition and its implications for the legal industry. Walters cofounded Fastcase in 1999 along with his former Covington & Burling colleague Phil Rosenthal. After Fastcase merged with vLex, he became vLex's chief strategy officer. Since the Clio acquisition, he is now Clio's vice president of legal innovation and strategy.

Note: As of this recording, Clio had not yet closed its acquisition of vLex. The deal did finally close on Nov. 10.

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