Hire The Right Counsel Every Time With LegalVIEW® Predictive Insights

Determining the right outside counsel to hire for a given litigated matter is a critical decision that can have a major impact on both the outcome of your case and your legal spend. Today, the annual litigation spend for corporate legal departments and insurance claim groups is roughly $75 billion a year (that’s more than the size of the professional and college sports industries combined, for those keeping track at home).

With significant amounts of money and important case outcomes on the line, the decision of which counsel will be your best partner in any particular matter is a critical one. You want to know that you’re spending the right amount of money to get the best possible outcome. In the past, these decisions were made almost entirely on prior experience and inside knowledge of firms, players, geography, and relationships — in short, on gut feelings rather than data.

Not any more. With the LegalVIEW Predictive Insights Module, the new tool from from ELM Solutions, a business of Wolters Kluwer, corporate legal departments and insurance claims litigation groups can replace those gut feelings with data-driven decision-making. LegalVIEW Predictive Insights provides data on budgets, cycle times, and so much more, so you can make the right, informed decision every time.

The Path to Predictive Insights

In the age of big data, choosing counsel by gut feelings is no longer an option. Even assuming human intuition is correct (which we all know often isn’t the case), this approach has serious limitations and challenges for people who are new to the business and lack the requisite experience and expertise. Even seasoned attorneys or claims professionals need help, especially in new lines of business or unfamiliar jurisdictions. 

ELM Solutions set out to create a data-driven means of selecting the best possible outside counsel, starting with client insights and market research to determine how companies were making these decisions in the real world. Along with individual client data, ELM Solutions has the LegalVIEW database — over $130 billion worth of legal spend data — the largest and only thing like it in the industry. The LegalVIEW database is exactly the kind of clean, large volume of data that allows artificial intelligence (AI) to successfully produce useful analysis, and that’s exactly what ELM Solutions has done.

ELM Solutions combined its deep experience with AI solutions and the focus of Wolters Kluwer’s next-gen tech group on innovation, AI, and machine learning to create models and examine their existing data sets. The result was the LegalVIEW Predictive Insights Module, a sophisticated tool for choosing counsel that works within the user’s existing workflows and provides crucial answers about counsel options at the exact point of decision-making.

Insights In Action

LegalVIEW Predictive Insights is the next generation of legal management tools, focusing on budgeting, cycle time, and law firm selection in the normal stream of work when decisions need to be made. The tool provides more than just a list of potential law firms, but rather proactively ranks a list of firms that would be best for a particular client to partner with for a particular case, including information on budget ranges of what the case should cost and maximum/minimum cycle times for how long it should take to resolve the case.

Simply open a matter, and the module will automatically extract all the relevant data, including complexity, practice area, line of business, type of matter, and geographic location, and submit it to the AI engine. The AI engine then runs that information against the client’s universe of potential law firms, applying it against a segmented law firm schema. Within the top segments, weighted criteria are applied to generate the ranked list. That list, along with budget information, is sent back to the platform where they wait for the user to access them. The curated set of recommendations considers 23 different metrics to rank the law firms. 

The budget benchmark tells you how much matters of your type and complexity in the matter’s geography cost on average. You also get a maximum/minimum budget range prediction for each firm, based on real historical costs of similar matters at that firm. Another crucial metric is the likely cycle time in days, allowing you to judge how long it typically takes a given law firm to resolve a matter like yours compared to other firms on the list.

The number of available metrics, which you can choose dynamically based on your priorities, is impressive. Among others, LegalVIEW Predictive Insights provides information on the firm’s capacity, peer ratings, how accurate the firm is with invoicing, how well they’ve adhered to budgets in the past, how much money you’ve spent with them in the past year, and what discounts they provide. The idea is to empower users to make decisions that best align with their values, goals, and preferred metrics.

Once you’ve decided on a firm, you can assign it with a simple click and wait for the law firm to submit a budget. When you have that budget in hand, you can gain even more insights.

LegalVIEW Predictive Insights shows you the original budget prediction as compared to both the firm’s actual predicted budget and the overall budget benchmark. Click into the budget and you’ll see a breakdown across individual phases of a matter, such as case assessment, pleadings and motions, discovery, and trial prep.

This allows you to have informed discussions with a firm about their budget and ask critical questions about why certain budget aspects might be higher or lower than the predictions. After all, human expertise and nuance will always play into the actual budget of any given matter as driving factors on top of the empirical data.

As time passes, you can see how the invoices match up against the predictions and how the progress compares to the cycle predictions. In essence, LegalVIEW Predictive Insights is more than just a great way to pick the right counsel, it’s a roadmap to completion for your matter after that counsel is selected. And once a matter is closed, the matter details are fed back into the module, which uses machine learning to improve itself to provide better forecasting.

Data Matters

With data on your side, you’re no longer left to making blind decisions on which counsel to hire. The decision is still always yours to make (nothing says you have to pick the #1 ranked firm), but this tool empowers you to make the best possible decision based on data-driven predictions and all the background data that went into creating the weighted rankings. Simply put, the LegalVIEW Predictive Insights Module empowers humans with a data set far larger than they’ve ever had access to before, right at the point when crucial decisions need to be made.

Think of LegalVIEW Predictive Insights as your secret weapon for distilling all the tribal knowledge that’s been amassed by claims and legal departments over decades of hard work. What used to be nearly impossible to quantify is now available on one simple screen. With Predictive Insights on your side, you can feel confident that you’re making the right counsel decision every time.