Welcome back! In this week's Law Firm Disrupted, we look at a new legal analytics platform and ask what it means for the ability to track lawyers' success in court.

I'm Roy Strom, the author of this weekly briefing on the changing legal market. You can email me at [email protected] or sign up here to have this sent straight to your inbox.

What Will Real Lawyer Metrics Look Like?

Before this newsletter's Turkey-induced coma last week (welcome back!), we had been talking quite frequently about data.

We looked at the statistics behind Big Law hiring. We heard about a company trying to use data to bring Uber-style pricing to legal services. Now here's another one: LexisNexis has turned federal judges' rulings into sortable data.

The company's latest analytics platform, Context, represents a new level of analysis. It can tell you, for instance, what cases (and what portions of those cases) each judge cites most frequently for 100 different types of motions.

Nik Reed, the co-founder of Ravel Law, which LexisNexis purchased last year and whose technology powers Context, told me that analyzing judicial opinions and expert testimony challenges (how many times 380,000 different experts had their testimony admitted or thrown out and why) is just the start.

Reed said he would like to apply the same approach to the briefs that influence (or at least attempt to influence) the opinions that Context has already analyzed. Combining those two types of analysis could lead to interesting findings. For instance, how often do a particular lawyers' arguments actually end up in the opinion they are trying to shape?

I'm not a litigator, but I'd like to imagine subtle fist-pumps are happening in law offices across the country when lawyers see their arguments picked up by judges. Wouldn't it be nice to know who fist pumps the most? (Maybe then I could write a story about “The Tiger Woods of Motions to Dismiss!”) Or, conversely, who is most frequently forlorn? (Perhaps that could lead to a story about the Jason Dufner of Big Law.)

Lawyers have never seemed to want a statistical measure of their practices, other than maybe their number of U.S. Supreme Court arguments. I don't know of a big firm whose bio pages contain even the number of cases a lawyer has handled in any type of matter.

There are some good reasons for that. Winning and losing a case is not necessarily a good measure of a lawyer's ability. Cases are different, and you could argue that the best lawyers are often sought out for the cases with the least likelihood of “victory.”

But Reed's idea to analyze lawyers' briefs by how often their arguments successfully persuade judges seems like a more clear-cut metric of quality. If a case has progressed all the way to briefing a judge on a motion to dismiss, somebody involved in that case thinks it is at least a close-enough call to spend the money on the brief. With enough cases to serve as data points, you would likely get some directional understanding of a lawyer's ability.

Rick Merrill is also interested in discovering and bringing to market more reliable metrics of lawyers' success. Merrill was a Greenberg Traurig litigator before launching legal analytics company Gavelytics in 2015. The company provides metrics based on nearly all California state court judges that a Big Law litigator might appear in front of. It plans to soon expand to other states.

Merrill agrees that win-loss rates for lawyers are simplistic to the point of being dangerous. But he also thinks reliable metrics will be available someday soon.

“It's all coming,” Merrill says. “Fast forward a couple of years, and it will be absolutely unthinkable to not study your judge, to not study the lawyer you're going to hire in a statistical fashion. Reliable metrics will be created, and it will be unthinkable to not refer to them when making litigation strategy and tactical decisions.”

Merrill said a general counsel of a major technology company currently requires its law firms to use analytics products like Gavelytics. That points to one logical way that metrics might begin to permeate the market: Client demand.

Roy's Reading Corner

On Litigation Funding: Ralph Sutton of Validity Finance writes about five trends to watch in the litigation funding business for 2019, concluding that there may be a fight over the ethics of so-called “portfolio deals.” Sutton also predicts there will be a formal effort to self-regulate in the United States.

From Sutton: “Expect an elite group of litigation finance companies to form an association to ensure ethical and sustainable funding practices. The result will likely be a code of best practices, perhaps similar to one recently published in the United Kingdom by the ICCA-Queen Mary Task Force for funding international arbitrations.”

On Law Firm Innovation: Law.com's Vanessa Blum spoke with Orrick chairman Mitch Zuklie for a podcast on a wide range of issues, including the firm's “skunkworks” developments and Zuklie's opinions on how Big Law can continue to attract the country's best and brightest minds. It's worth a listen.

Here's an excerpt from Zuklie: “If we're going to convince the best talent to choose and stay in Big Law … we need to change the model. We need to be more flexible in our work. We need to be more thoughtful about career paths that enable men and women to raise families.”

On the Big Four: My colleague Dan Packel turned in a long and important read on the intentions of the Big Four in legal, and he concludes that law firms who aren't considering the accounting giants a threat are fooling themselves.

An interesting quote in the story comes from Dentons global chairman Joe Andrew: “Big accounting firms going into law is a Trojan horse. They are some of big law firms' best clients. They partner with us in serving some of our best clients. We are some of their best clients. They may not start not competing directly with big law firms for high-value work, but the history of innovation tells us that with their expertise in processing, their scale, their relationships with our best clients and their familiarity with technology, they will continue to go upstream until they are some of the largest and best law firms in the business.”

That's it for this week! Thanks again for reading, and please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. Sign up here to receive The Law Firm Disrupted as a weekly email.