Tag: legal analytics

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LexPredict – Empowering the Future of Legal Decision Making

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LexPredict is an enterprise legal technology and consulting firm, specializing in the application of best-in-class processes and technologies from the technology, financial services, and logistics industries to the practice of law, compliance, insurance, and risk management.

We focus on the goals of prediction, optimization, and risk management to enable holistic organizational changes that empower legal decision-making. These changes span people and processes, software and data, and execution and education.

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Law Firm COO & CFO Forum Pre-Conference Workshop on Big Data / Legal Analytics / Legal Informatics

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Screenshot 2015-10-29 13.45.15Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating in the Thomson Reuters Law Firm COO & CFO Forum Pre-Conference Workshop on Big Data.  The half day workshop explored various way that law firms and outside counsel can use data to be better lawyers and run better businesses.

Here is the information for my panel (below) and the full program is located here.

Few business trends are as simultaneously revered, derided, appreciated or ignored as that of big data. Used (somewhat flippantly) to describe large, complex data sets that resist traditional data processing applications, big data represents both a beginning and end for many professional industries ill- prepared to harness big data’s myriad benefits and value. This opening conversation lays the framework for our program by addressing four key questions and concerns:

  • What is big data?
  • Why should we use it?
  • Where does it lie within a business organization?
  • How do we identify ROI and value in big data investment?

Moderator:
John Fernandez – US Chief Innovation Officer and Partner Dentons; Global Chair, NextLaw Labs

Panelists:
Justin Ergler – Director, Alternative Fee Intelligence and Analytics, GlaxoSmithKline
Daniel Martin Katz – Associate Professor of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law; Chief Strategy Officer, LexPredict
Michael S. Klastava – Vice President, Global Head of Legal Data & Analytics, American International Group, Inc.
Christopher Zorn – Liberal Arts Research Professor of Political Science and Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University; Principal, Quantitative Analysis, Lawyer Metrics

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Legal Analytics – Introduction to the Course – Professors Daniel Martin Katz + Michael J Bommarito

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Here is an introductory slide deck from “Legal Analytics” which is a course that Mike Bommarito and I are teaching this semester. Relevant legal applications include predictive coding in e-discovery (i.e. classification), early case assessment and overall case prediction, pricing and staff forecasting, prediction of judicial behavior, etc.

As I have written in my recent article in Emory Law Journal – we are moving into an era of data driven law practice. This course is a direct response to demands from relevant industry stakeholders. For a large number of prediction tasks … humans + machines > humans or machines working alone.

We believe this is the first ever Machine Learning Course offered to law students and it our goal to help develop the first wave of human capital trained to thrive as this this new data driven era takes hold. Richard Susskind likes to highlight this famous quote from Wayne Gretzky … “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

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Using R for Quantitative Methods for Lawyers and Legal Analytics Courses (Professors Katz + Bommarito)

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While its performance is sometimes problematic for some extremely large data problems, R (with R studio frontend) is the data science language du jour for many small to medium data problems. Among other things, R is great because it is open source, hyper customizable with thousands of packages available to be loaded for a specific problem.

While Python and SQL are also important parts of the overall data science toolkit, we use R as our preferred language in both Quantitative Methods for Lawyers (3 credits) as well as in our Legal Analytics course (2 credits).  We have found that students who are diligent can make amazing strides in a relatively short amount of time.  For example, see this final project by Pat Ellis from last year’s course.

Here are some introductory resources that we have developed to get folks started: Loading R and R Studio
R Boot Camp – Part 1 – Loading Datasets and Basic Data Exploration
Data Cleaning and Additional Resources
R Boot Camp – Part 2 – Statistical Tests Using R
Basic Data Visualization in R
Scatter Plots, Covariance, Correlation Using R
Intro to Regression Analysis Using R

Over the balance of the 2014-2015 academic year, Mike and I will be introducing a variety of new things to the quantitative sequence including dplyR, etc. … more to come …