Legal Analytics

Legal analytics is the application of data to the business and practice of law. Legal analytics harnesses technologies, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and searching, to clean up, structure, and analyze raw data from dockets and other legal documents.This guide will highlight legal analytics resources.

In a 2017 survey, Lexis and ALM Legal Intelligence (ALM) surveyed leaders of the Am Law 200 (The annual "Am Law 100" and "Am Law 200" surveys, rank United States law firms by number of attorneys, profits per partner, and overall revenue) regarding their opinions on the value of Legal Analytics, and their views on how law firms can leverage analytics. "For purposes of the survey, legal analytics is defined as 'tools and/or capabilities powered by artificial intelligence technology capable of sorting through huge amounts of data to find trends associated with specific
courts, judges, expert witnesses, etc.'” Of the more than 300 litigators, trial attorneys and librarians at Am Law 200 firms, 36% of the AmLaw 200 use legal analytics and 29% say it’s a must have.

Above the Law and Bloomberg Law also conducted a Legal Practice Tool Survey. 70% of law firm respondents that use analytics in their survey agreed that the use of analytics has given their firms a competitive advantage.

The Coalition of Technology Resources for Lawyers (CTRL) partnered with The Information Governance Initiative (IGI) to survey corporate in-house counsel to determine how they use data analytics. Respondents consisted of  senior attorneys; IG, IT, and analytics professionals supporting their legal department; and other types of professionals supporting their legal department. Respondents belonged to small organizations (under 500 employees), mid-sized organizations (501 to 5,000); and large organizations (over 5,001). The majority of respondents agree that data analytics will be “will be very important, will be considered indispensable, and [their] use will be widespread” among the legal profession over the next 10 years.

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In the Lexis-ALM survey, 100% of those respondents said that legal analytics was most valuable in demonstrating competitive advantage to clients. 98% of those who have used Legal Analytics for litigation said they found them to be useful for determining strategy for particular courts or judges. 96% found legal analytics useful for predicting the likely outcomes of strategy or arguments, and 94% found legal analytics useful in case assessment. 82% of respondents reported that their use of analytics will likely increase. The areas where they see analytics use increasing are in saving money, pricing projects, winning cases, attracting new clients and growing existing clients. 

The Above the Law and Bloomberg Law survey confirms that the most valuable use of legal analytics for those surveyed dealt with using analytics for clients and the second most valuable use was for litigation strategy.  

For in-house counsel responding to the Coalition of Technology Resources for Lawyers survey, E-Discovery was the top usage for legal analytics with respondents seeing more growth in this use for the future. The survey found that in-house counsel are also using legal analytics to choose and evaluate law firms with 77% using analytics to evaluate firm billing rates and 88% using analytics to analyze performance. Additionally, those surveyed saw analytics increasingly being used for contract review. With a 146% growth in the number of organizations using analytics for contract review and 54% growth in the number of legal departments indicating that they will start using analytics for contract review.

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