Technology

alt.legal: Legal Analytics Is Heating Up In Hotlanta

This law professor is using analytics to identify patterns in legal documents and predict future outcomes.

By  
on

Charlotte Alexander

I took a spoonful of soup, trying to negotiate the delicate balance of eating my lunch and being a good listener in a conversation. My listening was focused on Professor Charlotte Alexander, sitting across from me outside of Highland Bakery in downtown Atlanta. Alexander is an associate professor at Georgia State University with a dual appointment — tenured in the Robinson College of Business and with a secondary appointment in the College of Law. She just started a Legal Analytics Lab at Georgia State, and obviously, I needed to learn more.

The manual research path

Alexander (B.A. Columbia, J.D. Harvard) moved down to Atlanta around the same time I did, in 2006. Her original day job was to work with the Georgia Legal Services Program as a Skadden Fellow. “I was working on farmworkers’ rights,” she said. As she advocated for farmworkers in her casework, she became interested in how courts serve or don’t serve workers, especially farm workers. “How does the federal court system treat farmworkers? Who gets to go to court, and who doesn’t?”

But the noble ranks of legal aid would not be the ultimate context for her service. “I always had an interest in empirical work.” So transitioning from practice, she entered the academy with a research focus on employment litigation. For some of her research, she hired a gaggle of law students to “code judges’ opinions over the last 3-4 years.”

To my legal managed services mind, this sounded a lot like document review. “We read large numbers of opinions and reduced them to specific variables, fields that didn’t get captured in Westlaw.” Informed by statistical methods and econometrics, she pulled her research using this protocol of law student-reviewed opinions.

Machine learning

Sponsored

Then one day, as she began to learn about machine learning in unstructured data, she had an epiphany. “It was a eureka moment,” recalled Alexander. “I realized I had adopted a labor-intensive approach to a task for text analytics!” And as it turned out, the Institute of Insight at Georgia State was a top-notch data analytics group that was eager to jump into more use cases.

At this point in our lunch, we geeked out for a moment — how did you translate your review protocol into a machine learning task, did you choose a supervised or unsupervised model, what about arbitration outcomes that aren’t always published, and much more. All the things that make my eyes light up and I could tell she was excited about what she’d learned too.

Finally, I tried to get us back on track. “Tell me more about the Legal Analytics Lab.” For starters, if data analytics could be applied in legal research, what would she do with this project she had started around employment outcomes in court opinions?

“Well,” explained Alexander, “the Department of Labor provided a grant to essentially do a similar exercise, with wider scope. So we are doing the project that way.” Armed with these resources, and working with the Free Law Project, one focus of the lab is to mine all available opinions on PACER related to a topic and then “go to town on them.” The Labor Department is interested in the hot question of a worker’s status as an independent contractor versus as an employee. D&O insurers are looking at securities class action filings. Others are interested in Fair Labor Standards litigation outcomes, or fintech patent applications.

The Legal Analytics Lab: research, teaching and collaboration

Sponsored

So thus is born the Legal Analytics Lab. It’s hard to believe that they “started last fall, and now we’re here!” exclaimed Alexander.

There are three areas of focus for the Lab. First, identifying and scoping out analytics in support of legal research. “Many of my colleagues view it as the next step of their research,” Alexander said. Another area for the Legal Analytics Lab focuses on teaching. Applying methodological skills to unstructured data in law is no easy task, but the Lab seeks to “raise a new generation of lawyers” that have these skills. They have certificate programs in the works for their J.D. students, and a dual-degree (Juris Doctor plus a Master’s in Analytics) could be the next natural step. Finally, the Lab collaborates with lawyers in practice, in industry sprints, to solve or investigate a highly specific area.

Into the future

As I always like to ask, “What’s your future vision for all of this?”

“We built the Lab as an extension of our existing methodology expertise on unstructured data,” replied Alexander. “We need to keep going and continue the work that’s just getting started. We’ll also need to deepen our bench of faculty who can think about use cases, but also other perspectives, like ethics systems. We want to bring more people together from the GSU community, like working with the Center for Access to Justice.”

In sum, at the end of the day, these efforts all go towards “building a nationally recognized center for analytics in the law.”

I’ve written about initiatives like this before. Legal education is changing, for the better. Whether it’s exploring project management perspectives to legal service delivery, or a disciplined approach to legal innovation, we know that soon, alt.legal won’t be so alt anymore, as an increasing wave of legal innovators enters the practice. Another example of that is this Legal Analytics Lab, where an academic institution like Georgia State, can intersect robust data analytics capabilities with the law and bring new insights to life.

And for the rest of us who are alt.legal veterans, we won’t be able to say with such ease, “Well, they don’t teach you that in law school, do they?”

Because thanks to Professor Alexander and others like her, soon the response will universally be, “Yes, they do.”

Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at [email protected] or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)

Topics

, , , , , , ,