You probably think of big data as the province of big firms. Those are the firms more likely to represent the large corporations that amass big data, advising about its retention, management and discovery. Large firms even use big data themselves for internal benchmarking and competitive intelligence. Big, it would seem, wields big.
Small firms, however, also stand to benefit from big data. Various technology tools enable even solo lawyers to analyze large data sets in ways that provide them with intelligence they can use in their practices.
Take the example of Caesar, Rivise, Bernstein, Cohen & Pokotilow, an 18-lawyer intellectual property firm in Philadelphia. It uses a product called Patent Advisor that was developed by Reed Technology Information Systems, a LexisNexis-owned company.
In a 2013 agreement, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office authorized Reed to mine data from its Patent Application Information Retrieval system, which provides details about applications and their status. Under the agreement, Reed makes PAIR data publicly available as a bulk download.
