Understanding How Judges Write, Reason And Rule

Many legal professionals are now familiar with legal analytics, which savvy attorneys have been using over the last five years to make more informed judgements when selecting venues, evaluating opposing counsel and making important business decisions.  

Legal analytics uses information from millions of pages of federal court dockets to generate insights and make quantitative predictions that attorneys can use to inform legal and business strategy. It is the result of combining proven technologies like machine learning and natural language processing with the expertise of attorneys, editors and other subject matter experts to structure vast amounts of complex legal data and analyze that data statistically. At LexisNexis – which has been investing for years in technology to support data-driven legal workflows – experts “train” computers to add details like tags and metadata to vast stores of raw case law data with better-than-human accuracy, and at unprecedented scale.

Attorneys now have a powerful new toolset at their disposal. They can make faster, smarter, facts-based strategic decisions in litigation and the business of law, and they can monitor key industry trends as they unfold. That’s why legal analytics has moved from the margins of the legal profession to the mainstream in just a few years.

Introducing Context: The legal analytics toolset expands to case law language

Use cases for legal analytics are now expanding beyond the mining of dockets. A new class of analytics developed by LexisNexis – language analytics – is being used to identify patterns and trends in the actual language that individual judges use or cite in rulings and opinions. Context on Lexis Advance® represents the second wave of legal analytics, and is currently the industry’s only case law language analytics solution.

Understanding how judges think. Until recently, attorneys have had to rely on anecdotal information to understand the predilections of judges and develop lines of reasoning most likely to persuade judges presiding over their cases. Having the opportunity to consult an attorney who has litigated repeatedly in certain venues or who spent years clerking for a particular judge can be indispensable when litigating a high-value case before that judge. There are patterns in the way judges write and reason and rule, but anecdotal knowledge is hard to find, is not always reliable and simply doesn’t scale.

Enter Context, which provides insight into the thinking and writing of individual judges that doesn’t depend on who you know or what you’ve heard. The same analytics technologies that help attorneys select venues and evaluate opposing counsel and parties are now being applied to the specific language, opinions and citations that appear in a judge’s writing across a complete corpus of cases. Having detailed knowledge about patterns in the language a judge uses routinely and knowing the cases a judge frequently cites can help attorneys craft arguments that are likely to persuade the same judge in new cases.

Without language analytics you would have no way of knowing, for instance, that the judge you are arguing before has repeatedly expressed disdain for sports analogies; having such information gives you an advantage over your adversaries in court. A partner at one prominent firm uses language analytics while on the phone with clients to quickly look up a judge’s rulings to predict the success of specific motions the clients are considering. Context allows you to view a judge’s grant and denial rates across 100 motion types.

Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of expert witnesses. In addition to identifying the language a judge finds most persuasive, language analytics is also helping legal teams evaluate expert witnesses. Again, until very recently attorneys have had to depend on anecdotal information to understand how a given expert has fared in the past and why. Language analytics isolates the elements in an expert’s testimony that have been decisive in previous cases, and presents findings in easily graspable summaries and dashboards.

The information goes far beyond biographical and professional details. You can determine whether a witness appears more frequently for plaintiff or defense and how successful they have been getting testimony admitted – and why. You can even create a scorecard in Context for a witness’s past testimony using the Daubert standard to understand the bases of successful challenges, such as inadequate methodology, lack of relevance or poor qualifications. This information is invaluable, whether you are considering hiring an expert or looking to impeach the testimony of the opposition’s experts.

Achieving better legal outcomes through data-driven insights

Already the leader in legal analytics, LexisNexis is far ahead of the competition in language analytics, and has plans to expand its focus beyond judges and expert witnesses to other areas, including corporations and plaintiffs. As the technology evolves, the kinds of questions analytics will be able to answer will grow more diverse, and clients will put their trust in firms that use analytical tools to tailor arguments to specific contexts, accurately forecast legal outcomes and prevent clients from wasting money on poorly conceived legal strategies.

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By Nik Reed, founder and COO of Ravel Law, a LexisNexis company