There is a lot of interest in Big Data, Business Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, and other data-related fields these days. Whether in distinctly non-legal areas like the Internet of Things or legal areas like jury selection, litigation finance, textual analytics, and hedge fund replication, techniques for using data are clearly changing many aspects of the business world.
This set of tools and techniques as a whole can be generically termed data analytics — and with major increases in computing power and software interfaces, 2017 may well be the biggest year yet for data analytics advances. Still for most novices in the field, there is a major misunderstanding around what data analytics can and cannot do.
Lawyers are often thought of as a traditional bunch, but there are significant opportunities for those attorneys who embrace new concepts built on data use. The key to such efforts though is investing in new data analytics capacity as a process rather than thinking of it as a one-time effort.
