Big data uncovers surprising facts about litigation. How do attorneys and law firms compare? Do some lawyers drag out cases? Are partners really better than associates ? Do you get what you pay for in law? Artificial Intelligence takes a revealing look at a hidden profession.

The Brad Pitt film, Moneyball, portrays Billy Beane baseball team manager of the Oakland A’s struggling against accepted dogma in player selection. Beane’s insight was to use already available player data to pick athletes. This flew in the face of accepted conventional wisdom in the game. Talent scouts prided themselves on their “eye” for talent, choosing drafts by gut feel, pitching and batting style, even factors such as their demeanor off the field and the attractiveness of their wives and girlfriends. Despite a rocky start, strongly opposed by the A’s talent scouts, Beane put together a team that went down in baseball history. Derided, The Oakland A’s put together a roster of players believed to be lacking in talent, past their prime or unusable. Not only did the team prove itself by results, they were assembled with one of the lowest budgets in the sport. Win rates were not correlated with salary rates, Hon. Toby Unwin writes in International In-House Counsel Journal.

Lawyer selection is much like the bad old days of baseball player selection, contends Premonition LLC., a Florida based Artificial Intelligence company targeting the legal industry. Premonition claims to know which attorneys usually win before which judges. People pick attorneys based on recommendations from friends, online reviews, because they’re friends, friends of friends, went to a particular law school, have nice offices, work for a renowned firm, an advertisement, they found them in the phone book, etc. Many publications run “Top Lawyer” lists, people who are recognized by their peers as being “the best”. Premonition analyzed the win rates of these attorneys, it turned out most were average. The only way that they stood out was a disproportionate number of appealed and re-opened cases, i.e. they were good at dragging out litigation. They discovered that even the law firms themselves were poor at picking litigators. In a study of the United Kingdom Court of Appeals, it found a slight negative correlation of -0.1 between win rates and re-hiring rates, i.e. a barrister 20% better than their peers was actually 2% less likely to be re-hired!

Read original article


Tags: