At her Dewey B. Strategic blog, Jean O’Grady took an unscientific but nonetheless fascinating poll of her readers to ask them about the best new products they became aware of in 2014. She also asked them about the products or services they would like to have but that do not currently exist.

Jean is director of research services and libraries at DLA Piper and it is probably fair to say that a good share of her readers work in law libraries or legal information services. The results are clearly skewed towards that sector, but they are interesting even so.

When she asked her readers to pick the best new product of 2014, two came out on top:

• Lex Machina, a service that uses analytics to mine intelligence out of IP litigation data.
• PacerPro, a service that makes it easier to find and manage PACER documents. (Note: I serve on PacerPro’s advisory board.)

What I find interesting about this is that these are both products that use information that is already out there and available to anyone — court records — but that make it easier to access and analyze that information.

Both of these products representative a broader trend in the legal field to use analytics to gain new types of insights into data. This is often described as a “Big Data” function, but I think we tend to overlook the fact that data we’ve long had access to, such as court records and court opinions, are forms of Big Data that can be mined to extract information we haven’t had access to before.

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