LexisNexis has today (1 March) launched a United States-focussed attorney analytics solution – the fifth module of its language analytics platform Context – which enables users to quickly analyse their opposing counsel’s arguments based on similar cases.
Context Attorney Analytics tracks more than one million attorneys. It extracts and highlights the language an attorney has used in similar litigation documents including briefs, pleadings and motions. It follows earlier modules analysing judges, expert witnesses, courts and companies.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, LexisNexis senior director Serena Wellen and senior product manager Muthuraman KasiViswanathan demonstrated how Context enables attorneys to better work out how their opponents think. Wallen told editor Caroline Hill: “Our customers need to know who they are litigating against and what their rate of success is. They need to size them up and know ow their opponents think in order to construct counterarguments.”
LexisNexis also envisages that the new module will be used in hiring attorneys and Wallen said: “Being able to hire the right attorney means you need their background information and data on their outcomes. You can now work out how or why attorney won or lost a case by looking at their own work product.”
Current research is done by librarians, professional support lawyers and paralegals and Lexis spent a significant amount of time conducting customer research into the process. Wallen said: “After we pulled together the workflow it was shockingly time consuming.” Much of the research starts in Google and on Bar Association websites as well as in case law available in LexisNexis. Wallen said: “What Context does is take this manual, heavy labour process and automates it.”
In a demonstration by Kasiviswanathan, we looked at the example of Timothy Bear from Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner. A dashboard provides all the important information about Bear and his experience. You can see his previous law firm experience and the Court he was admitted to, all in one place.
On the right of the page are litigation events filtered by areas of law and court. You can enter keywords to find highly granular practice areas and topics, which brings up those cases. KasiViswanathan said: “During our research customers said they want to find cases that are relevant. By finding, extracting and classifying attorney arguments we have achieved that.”
“Knowing the language that opposing counsel has successfully used in similar court cases can give attorneys critical insights and a tremendous advantage when preparing for trial,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO, LexisNexis North America. “No other analytics offering directly connects legal language argument activity and written judicial opinions for specific attorneys.”