The US company Thomson Reuters, together with Centre GMBH and West Publishing Corporation, has filed a lawsuit against Ross Intelligence Inc. claiming that it has stolen and copied legal content stored on Westlaw, Thomson Reuters' legal search engine.

Within the complaint (attached), filed on 6 May in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, the plaintiff claims that ROSS "intentionally and knowingly" contacted LegalEase Solutions to use its registered account at Westlaw to forward all data contained on this platform to ROSS.

“ROSS illicitly and surreptitiously used a then-Westlaw licensee to acquire access to and copy Plaintiffs’ valuable content. ROSS did so, not for the purposes of legal research, but to rush out a competing product without having to spend the resources, creative energy, and time to create it itself. The net result is that Plaintiffs are now being put in the unfair position of having to compete with a product that they unknowingly helped create”, the complaint alleges.

Thus, the Plaintiffs explain that a bot has been systematically collecting and downloading content from the Westlaw database in bulk.

“Further investigation revealed that users of certain Westlaw credentials assigned to LegalEase were exhibiting activity that indicated that computer software, or a “bot,” was being used and that it appeared as though content from Westlaw was being downloaded and stored in bulk by said those software tools in violation of the Service Agreement. West observed that LegalEase’s software was systematically making its way through the WKNS (West Key Number System) to, upon information and belief, reproduce and store the manner in which the WKNS was organized”.

The Plaintiffs argue that Ross committed these infringements after Westlaw refused its license, since Westlaw's competitors are not allowed access.

ROSS contacted LegalEase in 2017 to get access to Westlaw data. Prior to July 2017, LegalEase user conducted 6,000 transactions per month at Westlaw. After that month, LegalEase increased the number of transactions dramatically, reaching 236,000 transactions per month, the Plaintiffs explain.

“Upon information and belief, ROSS paid LegalEase to copy the Westlaw Content from Westlaw to build ROSS’s competing platform, thereby knowingly and deliberately instructing LegalEase to breach its Service Agreement with West. Upon information and belief, LegalEase and ROSS have been working together since at least October 2015”.

While a lot of extra hours and expenses were spent creating the content at Westlaw, ROSS took advantage of the rapid development of its platform, the Plaintiffs remark, by illegally appropriating proprietary data.

ROSS first began by offering research services in both bankruptcy and intellectual property law, but now offers case law, statutes, and regulations across various practice areas and all 50 states.

In turn, LegalEase is alleged to have infringed the copyright of Westlaw's products, owned by Thomson Reuters, by distributing legal content to ROSS.

The complaint filed by Thomson Reuters and the other two plaintiffs has surprised ROSS CEO Andrew Arruda since two days earlier West Publishing Corporation (Westlaw) and LegalEase ended a lawsuit between them through a private settlement.

Through this settlement, LegalEase accepts an injunction prohibiting it from reproducing Westlaw's content, as well as using bots to access Westlaw and sharing its user to third parties for access on the platform.

The allegations that West Publishing Corporation made in the complaint filed against LegalEase are the same allegations that Thomson Reuters and the other plaintiffs make in the complaint filed against Ross.