The Project Counsel Group
14 February 2018 (Paris, France) – If there was a dominant theme at Legalweek this year it was this: for lawyers (especially litigators) performing accurate legal research has always been the core skill of successful lawyering. But over the past few years a new tool has appeared in litigators’ tool kits: legal analytics.
As noted by Owen Byrd … entrepreneur, lawyer, data geek, politico, urbanist, developer, and Chief Evangelist and Legal Counsel at Lex Machina … it breaks out like this:
Legal analytics involves mining data contained in case documents and docket entries, and then aggregating that data to provide previously unknowable insights into the behavior of the individuals (judges and lawyers), organizations (parties, courts, law firms), and the subjects of lawsuits (such as patents) that populate the litigation ecosystem. Litigators use legal analytics to reveal trends and patterns in past litigation that inform legal strategy and anticipate outcomes in current cases.
Data-driven insights from legal analytics do not replace legal research or reasoning, or lawyers themselves. They are a supplement, both prior to and during litigation.
Think of legal analytics as Moneyball for lawyers.
Legal analytics relies on advanced technologies, such as machine learning and natural language processing, to clean up, structure, and analyze raw data from millions of case dockets and documents.
And in-house counsel also use legal analytics to inform key business decisions, such as who to hire for outside counsel. What is the track record of firm Z in litigating certain kinds of cases? Which firms have the most experience in this area, and what were the outcomes of those cases?
As numerous speakers at Legalweek noted, the leaders at law departments recognize that data and analytics can be a powerful and sustainable source of competitive advantage. Many did note that for all the current enthusiasm (and media-driven “hype”), the surface of this field has only been scratched up to now.
But Katy-bar-the-door … it’s a’ comin!! This was best evidenced by a piece in yesterday’s Artificial Lawyer: UK-based insurance law firm BLM has announced a partnership with one of the world’s leading universities, the London School of Economics, to develop litigation prediction models as part of a wider move into legal analytics that is now spreading across the legal market:
This will include exploring AI and statistical predictive models for valuing disputes and predicting outcomes, predicting cost overruns and case length and managing litigation at a portfolio level.
This comes hot-on-the-heels of the announcement two weeks ago by global insurance powerhouse Allianz which chose French legal AI company, Predictice, to help it with litigation analysis and case prediction.
NOTE: we have written about the tremendous strides being made in France in the areas of advanced technologies, especially machine learning and natural language processing and legal analytics. Over the last two years, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have all opened AI research centres in Paris devoted to both theoretical research and practical applications. We’ll have much more about this in the coming weeks.
