Legal Analytics Committee Newsletter - September 2020

     

    In This Issue

    Business & Corporate

    Message from the Chair

    Warren Agin

    In September 2015 former Cyberspace Committee Chair Jeffrey Ritter gave a lecture at the Business Law Section’s annual meeting on what he called “Quantum Law;” basically the idea that legal systems could be integrated into technology systems. The talk attracted a large audience, and when he finished half the room left with a new vision of the future – while the other half left shaking their heads; convinced they had just spent an hour listening to the musings of a mad man. Jeffrey wasn’t alone in this vision though. Earlier that year Professor Oliver Goodenough had published Legal Technology 3.0, which contained the still to be prophetic line: “[w]e are, however, fast approaching 3.0, where the power of computational technology for communication, modeling and execution permit a radical redesign, if not a full replacement, of the current [legal] system itself.” And in Palo Alto, Chicago, and Michigan visionary leaders like Roland Vogl, Daniel Katz, and Dan Linna (more on him later) were building academic institutions designed to produce lawyers with the skills needed to bring to reality this new world of data and technology enabled law.

    Business & Corporate

    Legal Analytics: Measuring Outside Counsel by the Numbers

    Richard “Hitch” Thomson

    Over the last 20 years, corporate legal departments have seen a marked increase in the number and type of providers available to handle their matters. In 2017, revenue for Alternative Legal Service Providers (“ALSPs”) was around $10.7 billion, and covered an entire expanse of legal staffing companies, Legal Process Outsourcers (“LPOs”), consulting companies, and legal technology providers. Between new market entrants and the big firms, the pressure is on to be “cost efficient” and select the best provider for the work at hand.

    Business & Corporate

    Suffolk Law’s MassAccess Project: Scaling Justice with Rapid Form Automation

    Quinten Steenhuis

    Software developers like to say that you can’t deliver a baby in 1 month by putting 9 women on the job. But sometimes when the stars align right, you can sneak one past the software development gods. Massachusetts has proven that with the right combination of volunteers and free software tools, you can drag a court into the virtual world in record time. The result is Suffolk Law School’s MassAccess project.

    Business & Corporate

    Measuring the Value and Risks of AI for Professional Services: A Webinar Recap

    David Skoler

    What do professionals, including lawyers, need to know about artificial intelligence (“AI”) when they use it to deliver services? How can these professionals evaluate both the value and risks of using AI? These were just some of the topics discussed during the June 4 Thomson Reuters webinar, “Artificial Intelligence in Professional Services: Weighing and Measuring the Value and Risks”. A video of the webinar is available on YouTube.

    Business & Corporate

    Alternative Litigation Finance: Leveraging Legal Analytics to Navigate the World’s Largest Unstructured Data Set

    Lev Breydo

    Did you know that you can make money investing in other people’s lawsuits? Over the last decade, alternative litigation finance (“ALF”) – the “funding of litigation activities by entities other than the parties themselves” – has taken off in the U.S., with capital pouring in from “income-starved” investors seeking strong returns largely uncorrelated to public markets.