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NEWS DECEMBER 9, 2019 ¦ 15

information about its type, com- There is also Premonition.ai,
plexity and location and compares whose main office is in Miami.
details of that matter with the firms Founded in 2014, the company
currently used by that corporate le- claims to have the world’s largest
gal department. litigation database, scraping cases in
It ranks firms by performance state and federal courts every hour.
based on 23 features weighted to The database is used by several of its
match that client’s values. The AI analytics tools.
then looks at different firms’ per- ”We can run a national search
formance, as determined by client’s on our system and no one else can
metrics, within that type of mat- do that,” capturing 87% of the U.S.
ter, complexity and geography, and population, claims Toby Unwin,
makes a recommendation, ranking the company’s chief innovation
the law firms in order of the best officer and co-founder. He said
partners for that litigation. the company’s clients include in-
Venturella said the tool works surance companies and litigation
with most claims and litigation in- Matthew J. Kennedy, of Liberty funders.
cluding those with potentially Mutual Insurance. One of Premonition.ai’s prod-

large verdicts, like commercial ucts evaluates claims coming into
vehicle accidents for which there a legal department and codes
is a lot of data. But it can’t really them red, yellow or green like a
predict outcomes in mass torts traffic light. “Let’s say you have
such as the recent opioid litiga- As more and more corporate a traffic accident, if it is in Cook
tion because they are outliers, and law departments adopt this County, Illinois, it is a plaintiff-
there aren’t enough of them to use numbers-driven approach, friendly court but the same in
in a predictive model. Delaware is likely to be green.
law firms will have to

“When you have a once in a de- adapt by matching the The Illinois case you may want to

cade, or once in a lifetime verdict, metrics they provide in their settle quickly because you don’t
there is no like-to-like and you pitches to key performance want to touch a court system,”
have to bring in a different ex- indicators, or risk being shut Unwin said, describing how the
pert,” he said. tool can be used to reduce the
Some other companies and out of panels. risk of huge verdicts.

startups tapped by corporate law The company also provides
departments include UniCourt, a report that evaluates lawyers’
which offers software-as-a-service courtroom performance by their
that compares attorneys’ experience in specific types “win rates,” with a dismissal counting as a win for
of litigation and runs conflict-of-interest searches, the defense attorney, for instance, and a judgment as
among other functions; and CaseMetrix LLC of At- a plaintiff win in litigation.
lanta, which keeps a database of motor vehicle and
premises liability verdicts and settlements in seven Data-Mining and AI Challenges
southeastern states that is used by insurers and litiga- But Unwin and others in this growing field ac-
tion funders to estimate and benchmark payouts. knowledge that like all AI and data analytics, results
“They are using the data for risk assessments and try- can’t be much better than the data fed them. There
ing to figure out what a case is going to be worth and are thousands of courts in the United States, and
how much they should fund on it,” said CaseMetrix big differences in the accuracy and completeness
CEO Alan Pershing.
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