It's a familiar occurrence: A firmwide email goes out seeking intel on the judge just assigned to the new case. Anecdotes abound, and, if the matter is significant enough and for a high-paying client, intensive manual research begins.

A new product by Ravel Law called Judge Analytics gathers and analyzes rulings spanning a judge's entire career and puts that information in a dashboard. The program, Ravel says, helps litigators understand how judges think, write and rule by turning up the top cases and federal circuit courts that judge has cited.

“A lot of judges know they have patterns or tendencies, and many of them wish the practitioners understood this better,” said Daniel Lewis, CEO of Ravel Law, which spun out of advanced research at Stanford University's law school and computer science department. The question, he said was, “How can we level the playing field a bit and help lawyers understand their judge from a data-driven perspective with technology, rather than the traditional way, having three associates reading every opinion written by that hand.”