Every year, lawyers file litigation claims said to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet few lawyers have embraced data analytics to guide their litigation decisions in the way that bond traders or other industries rely on such tools.

That could be changing: A raft of new software and technology companies, including a few that are working directly with law firms, are mining the vast amounts of data available on litigation trends in both complex and simple cases to bring analytic tools to the legal industry. Experts believe these tools may be poised for serious growth in coming years and could inject new competition among law firms.

“We’re right in this transition where people are learning how to use this,” said Dan Katz, a professor at Illinois Tech’s Chicago Kent College of Law and a co-founder of consulting firm LexPredict, which offers consulting on legal analytics to law firms and corporate legal teams.

* * *

“Uncertainty is one of those things that promotes settlement,” he said, and part of the goal in using better data analytics is to reduce uncertainty.

Still, Robert Parnell, founder and CEO of SettlementAnalytics, argued there’s an “enormous pool of assets … being priced in settlement negotiations on little more than a whim and a hunch” and said there’s an “alarming regularity” to human error inherent in the process.

Read original article


Tags: