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Legal Analytics
MARKET RESEARCH ON LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

By:
Yeswanth Yenisetti

Background

Lawyers have traditionally competed by combining two key skills:

legal research and reasoning

But now theres a third leg to the law practice stool - Legal
Analytics

It enables lawyers to gain critical advantage in the business and

practice of law

Data driven insights helps all stakeholders to gain clear view of

the outcomes and plan for better management

Necessity - Enron Corporation

case study

California Energy Crisis

In 2000-2001, California is plagued by blackouts despite having

plenty of power plants

Enron played a key role in causing crisis

Reduced supply to state to cause price spikes

Made trades to profit from the market instability

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) investigated Enrons

involvement

Eventually led to $1.52 billion settlement

Necessity - Enron Corporation

case study

The eDiscovery Problem

Predictive Coding - Enron had millions of electronic files

Leads to the eDiscovery problem: how to find files

relevant to a lawsuit?

In legal parlance, searching for responsive documents

Traditionally, keyword search followed by manual review

Tedious process, Expensive, time consuming

More recently: predictive coding (technology-assisted review)

Manually label some of the documents to train models

Apply models to much larger set of documents

History

Early work includes modeling of the majority and minority

arguments in a US Tax law case and model of the rules and
regulations that govern an organization

International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL) was instituted in

1997

2004 One of the early legal prediction model

The Supreme Court forecasting model attempted to predict the

results of all the cases on the 2002 Term of the Supreme Court. The
model predicted 75% of cases correctly compared to experts who
only predicted 59.1% of cases

Topics in Analytics and Law

Formal models of legal reasoning

Computational models of argumentation and decision making

Computational models of evidential reasoning

Legal reasoning in multi-agent systems

Executable models of legislation

Automatic legal text classification and summarization

Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts

Machine learning and data mining for e-discovery and other legal
applications

Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval

Analytics Topics in Practice

Case Predictions- Predict the outcome of a legal question by

analyzing the authorities governing the question and the relevant
facts that gave rise to the legal question

Latest tools crawl web-based service across the Internet for data
from all known, reliable sources of law information. The service
makes predictions on how a new case will fare by weighing a number
of variables, including the feature of the case and the ruling history
of the judge the attorney will likely be facing

Commercial Provider:- Lex Machina

Persuasive Analysis - Attempts to persuade a deciding

authority to favorably decide the dispute for the author's client.

Analytics Topics in Practice

Competitive edge to Corporations - Corporations can

have the ability to view into the costs of legal services, as well as
specific advice on how to cut the best deal on legal services in
any given location

Allows corporations to approve, reject or reduce increases in

hourly rates requested by outside law firms

Commercial Provider:- Sky Analytics

Legal departments can compare their metrics with their peers

which allows them to quickly find areas where they can improve
costs, staffing

Commercial Provider:- Serengeti Tracker

Analytics Topics in Practice

Data Detection

Big data allows companies to benchmark how much they are

spending on legal services, how their lawyers compare to others,
what judges and districts are most favorable, and which lawyers
do well in those districts

Fee Facts- Helps law firms to get an insiders view into what
corporate legal departments are willing to pay before they show
up at the negotiating table and provide competitive advantage

Commercial Provider: TyMetrix analytics

Short term and Long term

developments

Legal spending management: Past billing patterns can be helpful in

negotiating hourly rates with law firms

Case and Litigation Strategy: Help attorneys to validate intuition.

This could weigh in different factors: the venue, opposing counsel, the
evidence, the witnesses, and looking at some past case history, and the
combination of these factors -- whether the evidence is not good or is
overwhelmingly favorable

Contract Management: Use analytics to improve the generation of the

contract leading to greater revenue, but also to reduce the risk
associated with poorly written contracts that could lead to commercial
disputes.

Preventive law programs: Used for policy making in identifying future

risks and building them into policies. Help to look ahead at potential risk
and build preventive law programs.

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Bottom line

With big data, virtually every aspect of the law is open to

detailed analysis. The technology is already there. And the
data is most certainly already there. Its simply a matter of
imagining what you want to look for

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References

https://lexmachina.com/law-firms/

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/116230

The Supreme Court Forecasting Project: Legal and Political

Science Approaches to Predicting Supreme Court Decision-Making
by Ruger, Theodore W.; Kim, Pauline T.; Martin, Andrew D.; Quinn,
Kevin M. 2004 - http://
deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/116230

EDX - 15.071 The Analytics Edge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_and_law

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_dawn_of_big_dat
a/

https://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/Insights/Perspective/Legal
/QandA-Legal-Analytics-Today-and-Tomorrow

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