Legal Analytics for Strategy and Case Management

Legal analytics involves the use of data to make quantitative legal predictions that inform decisions made in both the business of law (law department operations) and the practice of law (litigation and transactions). It is based on various kinds of litigation data that has become available from multiple sources.

The process identifies trends in the behavior of the involved players – including the lawyers, law firms, parties and judges – from the complex, unstructured legal data found in millions of pages of litigation dockets and documents.

Data can be applied to influence each step of the dispute resolution process, from early case assessment, where it can answer such threshold questions as how prospective defendants are likely to react to a claim, to selection of outside counsel, to choosing a venue or obtaining transfer and evaluating judges. Once litigation is under way, every step in the process can be informed by data that improves the chance of winning and minimizes unnecessary legal spending.

Similar kinds of analysis can be used to evaluate the opposing party, as well as opposing counsel.

Legal analytics brings lawyering back to its roots, providing attorneys with facts on which to base opinions, the core of good lawyering. It enables lawyers to combine insights gleaned from bottom-up raw data with traditional top-down controlling authority found in statutes, rules and court opinions. Traditional legal research and reasoning can now be supplemented with analytics, to inform legal advice, documents, negotiations and arguments.