“Disney’s a perfectly marvellous company, but it’s also very high-priced. Part of what it does is make ordinary movies, which is not a business that attracts me at all. However, part of what Disney has is better than a great gold mine. I mean, those videocassettes… Disney is an amazing example of autocatalysis.” They had all those movies in the can. They owned the copyright. And just as Coke could prosper when refrigeration came, when the videocassette was invented, Disney didn’t have to invent anything or do anything except take the thing out of the can and stick it on the cassette. And every parent and grandparent wanted his descendants to sit around and watch that stuff at home on videocassette. So Disney got this enormous tailwind….” - Excerpt from Poor Charlie’s Almanack.

While reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack I came across this idea of under-appreciated assets suddenly becoming engines of growth. A great example was Disney. The studio had already spent the money to create Snow White, Bambi, and every other classic. When home video arrived, Disney simply moved those films from theatre reels to VHS tapes. Parents could now buy the stories for rewatching. The cost to repurpose the content was tiny compared with the fresh wave of revenue that followed.

Munger called this kind of self-reinforcing payoff autocatalysis. In chemistry, a reaction speeds itself up once it starts. In business, a stored asset can suddenly compound when a new distribution channel, technology, or behavior emerges. Disney’s copyrights met the VCR and value snowballed.

The legal world has now got its own “films in the can” story.

Since 2000, Barcelona-based vLex has been collecting and digitising case law, statutes, journals, and court filings from more than one hundred countries. It kept licensing new collections, cleaning the text, and adding structured metadata. For years this looked like a niche publishing play.

The game changed with the rise of large language models. These models crave high-quality, full-text data that is legally cleared for use. Public web crawls rarely include full court opinions or premium law reviews. vLex, on the other hand, held a billion-document archive that was well indexed and citation ready. What once seemed like a quiet reference library turned into prime fuel for legal AI.

Private-equity backers stepped in, vLex merged with U.S. research company Fastcase, and in 2025 practice-management giant Clio agreed to buy the combined company for about a billion dollars. Clio’s user base of hundreds of thousands of lawyers is the distribution channel, while vLex’s data vault is the content. Together they plan to deliver research, drafting, and analytics tools powered by that proprietary corpus.

The parallel to Disney is striking. Disney’s core asset was its deep library of animated films; vLex’s was its vast archive of legal documents. The catalyst for Disney was the VCR; for vLex, it was generative AI.

The cost to repurpose the content was minimal in both cases.

So how do you spot one of these sleeping assets? There are a few tests: First, is it durable? Will the asset still matter as technology changes? Great stories last for generations, and authoritative law will always matter in court. Second, is it transferable? Can you move the asset into a new format at a low cost? Films moved from reels to tapes, and structured case law moves easily from a search database into an AI workflow. Finally, do you control the rights? If you don’t own the content, you can’t monetise it when a new format comes along.

A Playbook for Unlocking Hidden Assets:

  1. Inventory your vault. List every dataset, archive, and expert annotation your organisation controls.
  2. Clean and enrich now. Metadata and quality checks feel like overhead until a catalyst arrives.
  3. Acquire adjacent libraries while prices are low. vLex snapped up Justis Publishing before legal AI drove valuations higher.
  4. Secure distribution. Pair the asset with a channel that puts it in front of users daily.
  5. Wrap with intelligent tools. Content alone is not value; you need tools to convert it into user value.

Munger said you know you are onto something special when “you accomplish A and suddenly get A plus B plus C.” Disney’s film vault hit fast-forward with the VCR. vLex spent two decades building the world’s law vault, and AI turned that investment into a billion-dollar outcome.

I am trying to figure out which overlooked archive in another industry is poised for a similar AI-powered economic breakthrough.

[Edited using Claude.]