Qualitative Legal Prediction

Every single day lawyers and law firms are providing predictions to their clients regarding their prospects in a particular piece of litigation. How are these predictions being generated? Precisely what data or model is being leveraged? Could a subset of these predictions be improved by access to outcome data in a large number of “similar” cases.  This is the era of “big data” and soft artificial intelligence. Increases in computing power and decrease in data storage costs are fundamentally altering the scope of scientific inquiry. With respect to the delivery of legal services, the implications of ‘big data’ are significant. Namely, increasing access to large bodies of semi-structured legal information raises the possibility of significant improvements in quantitative legal prediction.