Tag: legal tech

Today’s 538 coverage of the Supreme Court presents both our Supreme Court prediction algorithm (which we call {Marshall+}) and our crowd based platform called “Fantasy SCOTUS.” Both approaches point to a very close decision in the latest Obamacare case (i.e. King v. Burwell).

Readers will probably observe that {Marshall+} is still a work in progress (for example – my colleague noted {Marshall+} believes that Justice Ginsburg would appear to be slightly more likely to vote to overturn the ACA than Justice Thomas).  While this probably will not prove to be correct in King v. Burwell, our method is rigorously backtested and designed to minimize errors across all predictions (not just in this specific case).  This optimization question is tricky for the model and it will be the source of future model improvements. I have preached the whole mantra Humans + Machines > Humans or Machines and this problem is a good example.  The problem with exclusive reliance upon human experts is they have cognitive biases, info processing issues, etc.  The problem with models is that they generate errors that humans would not.

Anyway, the good thing about having a base model such as {Marshall+} is that we can begin to incorporate a range of additional information in an effort to create a {Marshall++} and beyond.    And on that front there is more to come …