How to Create a Data-Driven Litigation Strategy
To craft your strongest litigation strategy, it is important to understand successful arguments in similar cases, how your judge tends to rule, what authority they tend to site, and the experience and typical motion practice of opposing counsel. This data has typically been a burden for small firms to obtain because collecting and analyzing this data has been too time consuming and cumbersome to gather manually.
Today’s newest legal analytics tools, such as Westlaw Edge, offer the capability to mine the entire body of a judge’s rulings, or to create comparisons using robust data sets. Once docket data is cleaned up and analyzed, lawyers can rely on statistical evidence of certain trends and outcomes, instead of anecdotes, to base their case predictions and legal strategy. And, this data can be presented to attorneys in minutes rather than requiring hours or even days to obtain manually.
Law firms across the country are now using Litigation Analytics on Westlaw Edge to build their strategies and prepare for trials. Let’s look deeper into some of the specific insights you can access to develop a data-driven litigation strategy:
Selection of Venue. If you have proper venue in more than one court, it is important to vet the potential jurisdictions that could hear your case. You want to select the proper court where your case is most likely to have a favorable outcome. Litigation Analytics can help you understand the amount of experience each court has, the length of time cases tend to take, how they tend to rule on your specific case type, and trends with motion practice.
Insights on a Judge. Understanding your judge is critical to creating a strong litigation strategy. With Litigation Analytics you can quickly identify how a judge has ruled before as well as the authority they tend to cite. Furthermore, you can see what motions they’re inclined to grant or deny and how often your judge has admitted or excluded expert testimony so you can craft your strategy and arguments accordingly.
Insights on Opposing Counsel. Knowing opposing counsel’s experience and typical behavior is critical when developing your strategy. Now with Litigation Analytics this information is at your fingertips. You can easily see their experience with the specific case type or with your judge, as well as what their motion practice is generally like.
Developing a data-driven litigation strategy does not require lawyers to become data scientists or software engineers or spend obnoxious amounts of time crunching data at the office. It requires lawyers to adopt Litigation Analytics tools, to treat the data as an asset, and to maximize its value by injecting it into their litigation strategy development.
Discover how easy it is to create a data-driven litigation strategy by accessing a free Litigation Analytics report on the judge or opposing counsel of your choice.
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