Data science and analytics, and its relatively small presence within the legal industry, is the business trend most commonly touted as evidence of the legal industry's Luddite status within the modern economy. But with new investments in data analytics, legal industry operations may be seeing more data-driven work in the future.

Legal services and technology group Epiq has announced the formation of a data products group, a branch of the company's innovation arm. The 30-person team will focus exclusively on potential applications of business analytics and data science in the legal industry, and will work with other innovation teams to weave data insight into its other products and services.

“Improved business and operational analytics related to legal services is something that the industry is hungry for,” Cliff Dutton, chief innovation officer at Epiq, told LTN.

While analytics has been a staple of modern e-discovery and project management practices for at least a few years, Dutton said that innovation in the development and use of analytics have opened up some pathways for other uses of data in legal services.

Epiq's announcement follows a slew of investments in analytics practices in legal technology over the last few years. Data and analytics products like Lex Machina and Ravel Law have expanded to include data covering multiple practice areas. Legal research software company FastCase acquired startup DocketAlarm earlier this year as well, flagging the startup's analytics engine as the core reason for acquisition.

Indeed, a recent study from market research group TechSci estimates that the legal analytics market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 32 percent, in value terms, between 2017 and 2022.

Dutton is hoping that Epiq's reach as one of the biggest legal services companies can set the new data products group apart from competitors. “Our scale gives us a unique perspective. Having an internal data science and data products team gives us the ability to leverage that perspective worldwide,” he said.

The growth of analytics, and especially machine learning and predictive analytics, are trends that Dutton saw “growing across the tech industry, not just the legal industry.” Although the legal industry may just now be finding its footing in how it can most effectively apply analytics to shape legal work, trying to leverage technology that the broader business market is using can help organizations at least keep pace. “Having this group will allow us to maintain alignment with our products and services with the broader application of AI and machine learning,” he said.

With today's news cycle dominated by headlines around Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg's congressional testimony and use of the social media site's data by political consulting group Cambridge Analytica, questions about data ownership and data privacy now increasingly go hand-in-hand with new data projects.

Dutton said the data products group will not use any aggregated data, and is “client-oriented and client permissioned,” exclusively. The group does, however, hope to use public data sets around legal performance and outcomes to inform the insights available in client data, essentially “to marry those two data sets,” Dutton noted.

Looking ahead, Dutton said the data products groups aims to tackle larger legal data projects, such as “improved legal risk metrics and compliance solutions that can be developed from data we have access to.”