Michael Sander's trajectory into legal technology followed what seems to be an emerging career path for millennials in law: turning repetitive legal work into profitable technology.

During his first few years working as a patent litigator for Kenyon & Kenyon, Sander found himself dealing with a lot of rote research in his initial case assessment work. “I was dealing with the same type of legal research question over and over and over and over. Probably more than a dozen times, maybe three dozen times,” he said.

In that routine, Sander saw potential for automation. During his nights and weekends, Sander began working on a set of tools to help him get through his docket research work faster and track broader trends through data, which quickly gained traction as colleagues and firms began to see value in those tools. About two years ago, Sander decided to end his legal career and focus specifically on his technology.

It seems to have paid off. Legal research platform Fastcase this week announced its acquisition of Sander's docket alerting and analytics company Docket Alarm. The acquisition will see Fastcase's database of judicial opinion data join with Docket Alarm's docket analysis tools.

Fastcase CEO Ed Walters stressed that the acquisition of Docket Alarm comes with intent to invest in and bolster the analytics platform. “We have a ton of respect for what Docket Alarm has built over time. We love the product. In one package you combine this beat analytics engine that gives you insights into judges, lawyers, law firms, causes of action. The analytics part of it is really compelling,” Walters said.

Rather than buy Sander out, however, Walters tapped the startup founder to serve as both managing director of Docket Alarm and director of Fastcase Analytics. Sander will be tasked with building out and expanding the platform he created. “The idea is to free us up so we can really start focusing on the product,” Sander said.

Docket Alarm currently features analytics and insights drawn from federal courts and 13 state courts. Sander hopes to build that out to all 50 states, along with expanding those capabilities to some administrative courts. He also plans to develop new ways to “slice and dice” data, bridging some of Docket Alarm's previous work with Fastcase's existing legal research database.

Walters explained that part of the attraction of the docket analytics company for Fastcase was its emphasis on design and data visualization that can make complex analytics easily comprehensible to users. “It's beautiful. It's crystal clear what's going on,” Walters said of Docket Alarm's visualizations. “At Fastcase, we're design nerds, so we love that Docket Alarm is a very visual service.”

That eye for design is important not just for aesthetics, but also in making legal analytics comprehensible, and thus actually useful. “The amount of information both in legal research and in analytics is useful, but it can be overwhelming, too. Data visualization is a way to really understand vast quantities of information at an intuitive level,” Walters explained.

Other legal analytics platforms have also garnered a fair amount of attention in recent years. Legal research giant LexisNexis acquired two different analytics platforms, Lex Machina in 2015 and Ravel Law in 2017, to capitalize on the growing demand for more data-driven legal work.

Walters is hoping that Fastcase's Docket Alarm acquisition will help the legal research platform push its user base, now upward of 800,000 users, in the same direction. Especially as more and more industries find ways to bring Big Data into their common work practices, Walters hopes that analytics can help attorneys bring quantifiable insight into their legal consultation. “It's a 21st century competency that we're just now building,” he said.

Access to the kind of analytics Sander began building through Docket Alarm, Walters said, is the first step in helping law fully move into the Big Data age. “It changes the practice of law. It becomes less a practice of guesswork and more of an exercise of analyzing data.”