Legal Technology and Innovation is global and I am proud to have the chance to teach in the LegalTech Masters Program at IE Law School in Madrid. This week, I will offer an online kickoff seminar on topics related to the program (sign up using the link) I look forward to meeting all of the students in the program next month in Madrid.
#PredictiveAnalytics #LegalInnovation #LegalAI#LegalData
#MachineLearning #LegalTech#LegalTechnology #LegalScience
I am excited to be quoted in the FT’s Big Read today!
Excited to take the show on the road next week where we will be presenting our SCOTUS Crowdsourcing Paper at University of Michigan Center for Political Studies and at the University of Minnesota Law School.
Here is Version 2.01 of the Law on the Market Paper —
From the Abstract: What happens when the Supreme Court of the United States decides a case impacting one or more publicly-traded firms? While many have observed anecdotal evidence linking decisions or oral arguments to abnormal stock returns, few have rigorously or systematically investigated the behavior of equities around Supreme Court actions. In this research, we present the first comprehensive, longitudinal study on the topic, spanning over 15 years and hundreds of cases and firms. Using both intra- and interday data around decisions and oral arguments, we evaluate the frequency and magnitude of statistically-significant abnormal return events after Supreme Court action. On a per-term basis, we find 5.3 cases and 7.8 stocks that exhibit abnormal returns after decision. In total, across the cases we examined, we find 79 out of the 211 cases (37%) exhibit an average abnormal return of 4.4% over a two-session window with an average |t|-statistic of 2.9. Finally, we observe that abnormal returns following Supreme Court decisions materialize over the span of hours and days, not minutes, yielding strong implications for market efficiency in this context. While we cannot causally separate substantive legal impact from mere revision of beliefs, we do find strong evidence that there is indeed a “law on the market” effect as measured by the frequency of abnormal return events, and that these abnormal returns are not immediately incorporated into prices.
Our SCOTUS Prediction Paper is now live in Plos One (one of my favorite journals) — very happy about this (thanks to Luís A. Nunes Amaral of Northwestern University for serving as our Editor). #OpenSourceScience #SCOTUS #LegalAnalytics #LegalData #QuantitativeLegalPrediction
Long time coming for us but here is Version 2.01 of our #SCOTUS Paper …
We have added three times the number years to the prediction model and now predict out-of-sample nearly two centuries of historical decisions (1816-2015). Then, we compare our results to three separate null models (including one which leverages in-sample information).
Here is the abstract: Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. Our model leverages the random forest method together with unique feature engineering to predict nearly two centuries of historical decisions (1816-2015). Using only data available prior to decision, our model outperforms null (baseline) models at both the justice and case level under both parametric and non-parametric tests. Over nearly two centuries, we achieve 70.2% accuracy at the case outcome level and 71.9% at the justice vote level. More recently, over the past century, we outperform an in-sample optimized null model by nearly 5%. Our performance is consistent with, and improves on the general level of prediction demonstrated by prior work; however, our model is distinctive because it can be applied out-of-sample to the entire past and future of the Court, not a single term. Our results represent an advance for the science of quantitative legal prediction and portend a range of other potential applications.