Using Data to Help Companies And Law Firms Win Big
Karl Harris, CEO of Lex Machina, discusses how Lex Machina’s legal analytics technology can be used to improve processes and reveal key trends, ultimately helping lawyers win business and win cases.
CCBJ: Tell us a bit about Lex Machina and your role within the legal community. Karl Harris: Lex Machina has pioneered the concept of legal analytics. We have a flagship product that helps companies win business and win cases by using data-driven decisionmaking. Just to give you an idea of what that means, we go through the briefs, the motions, the filings, all of the content that goes into litigation in the courtroom, and we use natural language processing and machine learning technology to extract specific information. For example: What is the judge’s likely behavior in a certain scenario? What should your strategy be given your current case? How are opposing counsel and opposing parties likely to behave? Big-picture things like that. We call it data-driven decisionmaking that helps you win business and win cases. In terms of our role within the legal community, there are two separate things there. One is our role as a business. We’re a business provider. We sell Lex Machina to law firms and companies that are involved in litigation. So, in that sense, we’re a software services provider. But second, in terms of the community itself, one of the value statements at Lex Machina is to bring openness and transparency to the law. We think that by making information and statistics about how cases progress in a courtroom available – for example, how long will it take, what’s the judge’s likely behavior, what are the likely damages or other outcomes, all those types of things – it brings transparency to the legal system, 28
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which ultimately is a better thing for our legal community. I think that kind of transparency also improves access to justice, because one of the reasons that many folks are hesitant to use the legal system or are underserved by it is because it’s such an opaque process to many people. Using data to explain what’s going on helps with both of those things. How are in-house law departments using artificial intelligence, analytics and legal task automation for process improvement? When I think about process improvement, there are all sorts of different processes that an in-house legal department is required to do. One of the first things that in-house departments do, generally, is select outside counsel to represent them in particular matters. There are obviously businesses that handle litigation in-house, but those are few and far between, and even those types of businesses usually end up partnering with outside law firms at some point or another. And when it comes to selecting outside counsel to handle particular matters, artificial intelligence and analytics can certainly help there. It’s actually one of the most common use cases for Lex Machina. In-house counsel can answer various questions this way: What’s the actual track record of this law firm in similar situations to mine? How have they performed in front of this particular judge? What has their experience been against a particular opposing party or opposing counsel, and what outcomes have they gotten? So, the first thing in terms of a process improvement is getting better at selecting the right outside counsel to handle specific needs, which is something that Lex Machina does very well. So, that’s the first chunk. Now, let’s say you’ve selected your outside counsel, you have a litigation or a legal matter, and your goal is to manage it and, ideally, to get a favorable outcome for your company. That’s the next phase of legal analytics – winning cases. There are a few different ways that can
