Thinking… like a judge?
According to a 2019 American Bar Association survey, about 75 percent of large law firms (that is, more than 100 employees) have used data analytics in the legal field, and investments in related tools totaled about one billion dollars. Goals include developing strategy, predicting the results of the chosen strategy in court, preparing cases, and so on. In third place in terms of popularity among lawyers is the task of finding information about potential judges in the process.
Which argument is closer to the judge, in whose favor does he decide more often, and how fast does he do it? If it takes a person weeks to search, collect and then analyze court data, the software will spend hours doing it.
Large analytics platforms for attorneys who represent clients in court can “scan” all the cases that a particular judge has tried, collecting and storing information from a wide range of sources: for example, from the judge’s records or decisions. Such a platform then analyzes the collected data and builds a model of the judge’s reactions to the attorneys’ actions based on the analysis. It can determine which motions are most likely to be accepted or denied by judges, how often dissenting opinions will be used, and what precedents they are most likely to use in their decisions. Such platforms will also help law firms better understand how to conduct themselves in court: for example, they can bring in an expert who has appeared in a similar case or a lawyer who has extensive experience working with a particular judge.
In the U.S., where court information is public and not too difficult to find, there are at least a dozen analytical companies that provide such services. Among them, for example, are Litigation Analytics, Ravel Law, LexMachina and Premonition. “These days, everyone has baseball analytics (a reference to the movie Moneyball – The Sphere). Soon it will be the same with entitlement. And when everyone starts using it, it will all come down to how well you know how to use data,” the Financial Times quoted Josh Becker, head of Lex Machina, as saying.
Investors investing millions in predictive forensic analytics also believe this. Back in 2018, for example, California startup Gavelytics, which specializes in judicial analytics, received $3.2 million in funding to develop the project. In 2019, a similar project launched in the same state with an expanded geography – demand for such services is gradually growing.
Five years for the future
Data analytics can be used in both criminal and civil cases. For example, popular areas in the U.S. are intellectual property rights protection and patent cases. However, as FT author Barney Thompson notes in his article “Big Data: How Law Firms Play Moneyball,” there is one big problem for American lawyers: an almost complete lack of information on civil cases. According to him, almost 90% have either ended in settlements or are simply dismissed because it is extremely costly to run a long process.