For several years now, I’ve closed out the year with a round-up of the 10 most important legal developments (2016, 2015, 2014, 2013). Last year, I bypassed the top 10 to focus on a single overarching development, The Year of Women in Legal Tech.

1. Analytics become essential.

If you were to judge the year’s most important legal technology by looking at conference agendas and media coverage, you’d probably say it was the continuing development of artificial intelligence. But if you judge the most important technology by its direct impact on the practice of law, then it would have to be analytics. As I suggested in a recent column, we could be nearing the point where it would be malpractice for a lawyer not to use analytics.

At the center of the analytics story this year has been LexisNexis. Following its acquisitions of Lex Machina in 2015 and Ravel Law, it has been steadily working to build on the foundations established by those products and integrate them into its legal research platform Lexis Advance. It has steadily expanded the practice areas covered by Lex Machina’s analytics, and from Ravel it added both visual search results and the unique Context analytics that examine the language of judges’ opinions. The defining moment for LexisNexis this year came in July, when it put a stake in the ground to claim the analytics space.

But LexisNexis was by no means the only legal analytics story this year. Thomson Reuters also put down its claim with the launch of its next-generation research platform Westlaw Edge, which for the first time brought detailed docket analytics to the Westlaw research platform. Elsewhere in the legal world, Fastcase released its Analytics Workbench, which it said would allow legal professionals to build their own bespoke litigation analytics, and judicial analytics company Gavelytics got new funding and expanded the scope of its coverage.

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