How AI Can Impact
Your Next Case

This year internet privacy has been a big topic in the news.
After Facebook and other websites admitted they collect and sell our data to
marketers, sometimes without explicit consent, consumers have been alarmed by
the invasion of their privacy and are finally realizing some of the ways in
which supposedly harmless information can be used.

Until now, many wondered why a minority of consumers were so
bothered that information about the brands they like, their hobbies, or their favorite
foods is collected and sold to advertisers. We’ve now learned that when every
available channel of information is combined with information from other
sources (including credit bureaus and public records), a pretty complete file
about an individual’s life is available. Whoever possesses that file can
predict your behavior and deliver relevant ads.

They’re able to do that by utilizing artificial intelligence
companies, which use your data fingerprint to predict your future behavior -or
desires and use that information to deliver targeted ads to your computer.

The same type of technology is changing the way litigation
works, and multiple companies claim they can predict judicial behavior. From
the New
York Law Journal:

“Similar to the way online
retailers use predictive analytics to predict customer behavior, law firms can
use analytics to predict how judges and courts rule and the precedents they
rely on. “Learn how judges think, write and rule,” touts Ravel Law’s Judge
Analytics.

“Premonition claims the
world’s largest litigation database and mines data to find out “which lawyers
win which cases before which judges.” Similarly, Lex Machina’s legal analytics
reveal insights “never before available about judges, lawyers, parties, and the
subjects of the cases themselves, culled from millions of pages of litigation
information.”

It sounds creepy and almost unfair. But, the historical
information is what it is. It’s simply aggregating information usually only
held by long-term court watchers. Premonition’s co-founder, Guy Kurlandski, says:

“There is not enough aggregated
court data in one place; Al allows us to do it en masse. The tool is built
mainly on machine learning with some AI, but it’s fully automated. It has been
pulling more than a million cases a day and putting it into our data
framework.”

These databases take “local knowledge” and make it
easily accessible. Anyone who’s worked in a courtroom a long time knows which
judges rule more favorably on certain topics and which attorneys’ personalities’
conflict with which judges. Now insurance companies and law firms can research
which judges may be more sympathetic to a particular case or which attorney
should be lead counsel in a motion or trial.