On To The Next Wave Of Analytics: A Conversation With Nik Reed Of LexisNexis

Context is the legal industry’s only case-law language analytics tool.

Nicholas Reed, Co-Founder and COO of Ravel™ Law, a LexisNexis Company

ATL recently spoke with Nik Reed, one of the co-founders of Ravel Law, and currently Senior Director of Product Strategy for Context at LexisNexis, which acquired Ravel in 2017. (Context is a component of the Lexis Analytics suite of products.) Reed, a Stanford Law alum, had a varied career prior to law school, including stints with Henry Blodgett’s internet and telecom group at Merrill Lynch, and as a field organizer for Obama for America in 2008.  The Obama campaign particularly, with its innovative of use of data to understand how to best target undecided voters, foreshadowed his later work in developing data-driven insights for lawyers.

Our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, follows.

The 3 pillars of Context

I work to bring the technology and process we developed at Ravel, employing AI to create analytics from language, to a range of LexisNexis offerings, starting with the recently released Context, the legal industry’s only case-law language analytics tool.

Originally, we developed Ravel Law based on what we think of as three fundamental “pillars,” which we were excited to learn were concepts shared by the management at LexisNexis.

First, we were mindful of the uncertainty and stress experienced by young legal researchers. It was hard for them to know both where to begin and where to end. They are working under extreme time pressures. Thus, our focus has always been on the associate experience.

Second, we thought there must be a better way to get the answers they were seeking, and the use of data visualization — for example mapping related cases — seemed to provide a more intuitive and confidence building way forward. 

Third, we were driven by the challenge of how do you create meaningful analytics out of what is fundamentally unstructured legal data and go beyond keyword search?

The underpinnings of Ravel Technology and the Creation of Context on Lexis Advance

To create Context — part of the Lexis Analytics suite of products — Ravel Law’s language-based machine learning was extended to the unparalleled amount of case law and also other key litigation-related data sets, like expert witness profiles, housed on Lexis Advance.

Lexis Analytics is why LexisNexis [as a potential acquirer] resonated with us — because LexisNexis has actually been thinking about and working on AI and analytics for a really long time now. They made a significant technology development investment over the last 10 years to develop the right infrastructure so that they could work with companies like Ravel Law and [fellow LexisNexis acquisition] Lex Machina, and create more modern platforms to do what we do with machine learning and cloud-based computing technology at an unparalleled scale.

With these investments, LexisNexis built the foundation for a platform centered around AI, machine learning and natural processing, under the name Lexis Analytics. This platform embodies the LexisNexis commitment to analytics as a core part of everything we are doing going forward. Of course, this foundation for Lexis Analytics draws on the combination of innovations created by acquisitions like Intelligize, Lex Machina, and Ravel Law. But more importantly, this foundation is built on a more agile, iterative, and responsive approach to engineering and product development.

I wouldn’t be surprised if five years from now every single product that’s part of the LexisNexis portfolio has an analytics capability.

What sets Context apart from other litigation analytics tools

While other analytics tools mine docket information, Context is the first and only case-law language analytics tool for the legal industry. Context uses legal language analytics to identify, not only citations, but the specific language that judges will find most compelling, due to the fact that the judge has relied on this specific case language in previous rulings. These are meaningful, actionable insights that inform winning litigation strategy.  

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And Context is not just about judge analytics, it’s also about expert witnesses— how expert testimony will stand up in front of a particular judge.  Context’s database of 400,000 experts allows users to create “scorecards” to assess potential experts’ credentials and track records at a granular level (e.g., on what basis have previous challenges to this expert succeeded?). And the technology can continue to be extended, and will, to better understand courts, companies as litigants, law firms and even one day individual attorneys.

Often times the best part of building new technology comes in the form of customers reaching out to tell you how they solved a problem, or in our industry, won a case thanks to our product. One of our favorite stories is a firm that was based in New York that was representing a case in California, where they didn’t have any offices. They presented a certain argument in front of a judge, and the judge dismissed the argument more or less summarily stating that the type of argument was not something accepted in California courts. This argument was key, however, to their strategy. Later that day, looking at the judge’s dashboard in our tool, the attorneys found that the judge had previously ruled in favor of the exact same type of argument, several times in fact. When they presented that data to the judge the next day, data about the judge himself, he begrudgingly reversed.

On the horizon: merging law firm data with public data

The exciting next opportunity on the horizon is analyzing briefs written by attorneys. We’re focused on the writings of judges, but as we tie that to the briefs that were submitted, that the judges are responding to, we’re going to be able to unlock another world of valuable tools by connecting the external public data housed in Lexis Advance to the internal data gleaned from the mining of the briefs and motions. We’ll be merging the internal documents with the algorithms used on external documents.

It’s a really exciting time for legal technology because the capabilities in technology have caught up to the needs of attorneys. Maybe that happens every decade or two, there’s this moment where technological innovation meets the new challenges facing attorneys. Today, I think that’s mining legal language and creating useful tools based on that. We’re at one of those moments in time where we’re going to see a lot of really fascinating new applications of technology come out.

On to the next wave of analytics

LexisNexis already has a decade of heavy investment and thought in developing analytics tools. Fundamentally, I think we have a tremendous head start. The reason that’s important is because it’s really hard to make high quality data analytics. It takes really good data combined with very high quality annotation and markup. That takes investments in both time and money.

LexisNexis has made that investment, so I think whereas others in the market are launching their first version of analytics products, we’re kind of in the next wave, or maybe even the third wave already, of our version of analytics products. The head start in this market is really an important competitive advantage because others are still trying to figure out that first part, and playing catch up. Meanwhile, we’re building the entire next generation of products.