Summary: Using a database on litigation cases will change some of the unknown factors that lawyers must determine when deciding how to handle a case.
Litigation claims can be worth hundreds of billions of dollars but very few lawyers take advantage of data to help make the litigation process easier. There are mounds of data on complex and simple litigation trends that are being used to create analytic tools for law firms and lawyers to use.
A number of technology and software companies are working on compiling this data, which experts say will change the competition among law firms and promote growth. Lawyers are just starting to understand how to use the data but with a low number trying it out, there is a lack of third-party validation.
The validation these companies are seeking would require them to offer their product to another party to run cases with known outcomes and compare the predicted results from the program to the actual case results, similar to a clinical trial.
There are few products being used already. Lex Machina 
lists over two dozen law firms that use its database of millions of IP litigation cases for IP and patent litigation. The tools that structure the data for analysis are helpful when trying to make a decision about a case. Lawyers can gain insight on the statistics of how a particular judge or district tends to rule.
While it is not expected that data will ever be able to completely calculate settlement amounts because often some of the data that would be required to do this is private.
Source: https://bol.bna.com/data-analytics-gaining-ground-but-bold-promises-need-validation/
Photo: blogs.wsj.com
