Two Harvard University undergraduates are preparing to launch a website that will rate lawyers based on publicly available court records. The site, called Legalist, will mine and analyze court records in order to match clients with lawyers who win similar cases based on details and location. It will also profile litigators’ win-loss records.

The site is currently in beta testing and its developers hope to launch it in late summer or early fall. The testing phase is using only Massachusetts cases and the initial launch will start with Massachusetts lawyers. The developers plan to then begin rolling out the service to other states, beginning with the most-populous ones.

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I recently spoke with Shang and Haigh and asked them how their algorithm will handle all the cases that never go to trial, where the docket would not show a winner or loser. All of those cases will be factored into the overall experience rating, they said, in that if a lawyer has handled a high number of a certain type of case, even if all the cases settled, the algorithm would presume that the lawyer is better at those cases than one who’d handled only one or two.

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