Lawyers will give you any number of reasons why their win-loss rates in court are not accurate reflections of their legal skills. Yet a growing number of companies are evaluating lawyers by this standard – compiling and analyzing lawyers’ litigation track records to help consumers and businesses make more-informed hiring decisions.

The latest to do this is Justice Toolbox, a startup that uses data mined from official state court records to compute and display how many cases a lawyer has won and lost and the lawyer’s approximate win rate. As I wrote at my Lawsites blog Friday, it currently operates only in Maryland and the District of Columbia, but plans to expand to several more locations by June.

Justice Toolbox is targeted at individuals and small businesses requiring legal help. It evaluates lawyers’ records in common types of cases, such as DUI defense, small business disputes, personal injury cases, divorces, and landlord/tenant disputes.

Another company, Premonition, is doing something similar for large corporate clients. Like Justice Toolbox, Premonition uses advanced analytics to evaluate lawyers based on their win-loss records. But it does it on a much larger scale. It claims to have the world’s largest collection of court data, covering the U.S. district and circuit courts, the UK High Courts, the Virgin Islands, Ireland, Australia, and the Netherlands.

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