A Spectrum of Tools to Support Litigation Risk Assessment: Promise and Limitations
This post has been viewed 3,172 times.
A common theme for legal futurists is the call for legal professionals to take leadership in the world’s rapidly changing and complex economy. This challenge is often framed on a large scale, around the invention of a renewed legal infrastructure and a broadly imagined scope for legal services. The idea that lawyers should pay attention to shifting challenges and opportunities is relevant on a smaller, practical scale in the context of litigation and settlement–where numerous tools are available to support systematic risk assessment. The systematic assessment of litigation risk is increasingly expected by commercial clients, and yet not all lawyers are comfortable with this role and methods for accomplishing it.
d) Picture It Settled®
Some programs and services focus primarily on data and projections derived from settlement data. Picture It Settled® is a predictive negotiation planning technology created by Don Philbin, a Texas attorney-mediator, and the Southwest Research Institute®. The software is designed to help the user plan a negotiation strategy that will induce cooperative behavior. It provides three tools for users: probabilistic evaluation of cases using predictions of high, medium, low and zero outcomes weighted by probability and anticipated costs; and two tools that use data from about 20,000 negotiations to assist negotiators in designing strategy by anticipating the behavior of other parties and forecasting settlement amounts. Picture It Settled® also encourages anonymous donations of settlement data through its Data Contributor program. The decision to offers this technology through free apps for most mobile devices (albeit with limited functionality) has assisted in increasing the quantity of anonymous case settlement information.
Read original articleTags:
