Updated: With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, many traditional software categories have been reinvented. Legal software has not been immune from this impactful change. Over the past few years, AI has been increasingly embedded into tools that support legal workflows, and the result has been improved functionality that increases the overall intuitiveness and value of legal software.

The next generation of litigation analytics

Litigation analytics software is no exception to this trend. This category of software has changed significantly since I last wrote about it in 2020. The addition of more sophisticated AI capabilities, including generative AI, to some platforms, has supercharged the output. As a result, this category of software is even more appealing than ever to litigation attorneys and their teams.

Since the rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022, improved AI capabilities have impacted new and existing litigation analytics tools, noticeably increasing competition in this space. With this influx of AI-enabled products comes the challenge of sifting through the many choices available to identify the tool that is the best fit for your law firm’s needs.

That’s where this article comes in. I’ll provide an overview of this software category, tips for choosing the right tools, and a rundown of top contenders in the space.

The how and why of litigation analytics

Litigation analytics software quickly sifts through court records, filings and other public and private datasets, providing users with organized insights about judges, case outcomes, attorneys, expert witnesses and more. This technology helps legal professionals identify the patterns and trends that influence the direction of a case, providing for more informed strategy development.

With the addition of generative AI, these tools go beyond traditional data sorting. Generative AI capabilities enable the software to not only organize and analyze data but also generate summaries, predict potential outcomes, and offer strategic recommendations based on historical trends and similar cases. For example, the software can highlight patterns in a judge’s previous rulings or identify the likelihood of success for certain motions.

This enhanced functionality enables legal teams to reduce the time spent on manual research and data analysis. Using real-time, AI-powered insights, lawyers can make more informed decisions, improving the accuracy and efficiency of case preparation. Whether forecasting a case’s outcome or identifying trends in opposing counsel’s litigation tactics, these tools help legal professionals optimize their strategies from start to finish. The result is not just improved workflow efficiency but an increase in data-driven decision-making that can have a direct impact on litigation success.

Evaluating AI tools for litigation analytics

Before exploring new AI-powered software, you’ll have to first evaluate your firm’s current tech choices. Software vendors often introduce updates or may be in the process of forming partnerships that enhance the platforms that are already used in your firm, which could potentially add the features you’re seeking. Checking with your firm’s trusted providers before evaluating other tools can save time and resources by avoiding redundant purchases.

If you determine that a new solution is necessary, the next step is to clearly define the problems you have to solve. Review your firm’s current tech to identify gaps in your IT stack and uncover workflow inefficiencies. Make sure to involve team members who will use the software, so that you better understand their pain points and preferences. Their input will ensure a smoother adoption process and alignment with day-to-day operations.

Once you have a clear sense of your needs, research available tools. The list of litigation analytics platforms below is a good starting point. Take advantage of free trials or demos to test functionality and determine whether the software integrates well with your existing systems and workflows.

Security and compliance are also essential considerations when adopting AI tools. Your firm’s ethical obligations require careful vetting of any third-party provider that handles your firm’s confidential information. Confirm how client data will be handled, stored and backed up. Determine who will have access to it and under what circumstances.

Additionally, because analytics tools depend on firm data, ensuring robust data security is critical. While vendors often claim to protect data, you should verify the protections in place and assess whether the steps taken meet professional and regulatory standards.

When researching AI tools, another security factor to consider is whether the provider uses your firm’s data inputs to further train its AI models. Current ethics guidance suggests that confidential data should not be used for this purpose.

Finally, evaluate the AI tool’s accuracy and reliability. Consider how well it performs tasks, such as analyzing court data and predicting litigation outcomes, ensuring that it complements rather than complicates your litigation strategy. With these factors addressed, your firm will be better equipped to adopt a solution that enhances efficiency and litigation management.

With that advice in mind, let’s review some generative AI-enhanced litigation analytics tools. Understand that this list is not all-inclusive. Additionally, offerings from large legal tech companies, like Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis and vLex, are excluded. Each of these companies provides large-scale generative AI platforms that include litigation analytics data, so if your firm has these tools in place, it’s worth learning more about these capabilities and their costs before investing in a stand-alone option.

The cost of most legal analytics software depends on subscription models, features and firm size and is often negotiated with the vendor. However, if pricing is available on the company’s website, it will be included below.

Litigation analytics software with AI capabilities

First, there’s Trellis, which is a state trial court research and analytics platform. It provides access to court dockets and the judicial rulings of most states. Trellis offers insights into judges, opposing counsel and their firms and case outcomes. Pricing starts at $129.95 per month for up to three accounts.

LegalMation is an AI-driven tool that automates the litigation process. It generates legal documents and provides data analytics for litigators. The analytics provided draw from datasets that include external sources, such as court dockets, along with a firm’s internal data and documents. Reports provided include a risk index, outcome and cost predictions and counsel comparisons.

Another option is Premonition, an AI-driven litigation data and analytics platform. It predicts motion outcomes and provides insights into lawyers, firms, companies, judges and courts, offering comprehensive data coverage and detailed analysis of various litigation participants.

Finally, Pre/Dicta collects, classifies and analyzes the entire federal docket and every judge’s unique personal attributes, including age, gender, resumé/background and political affiliation. Then, using what it calls “predictive AI,” it predicts the success or failure of a motion to dismiss before that judge.

Maximizing litigation teams’ efficiency with AI

We are in a fast-moving era of technological advancements, and ignoring AI is not an option. Instead, position your firm for long-term growth by investing in AI-powered software that streamlines your teams’ litigation workflows and supports strategic decision-making.

The data-driven insights will improve courtroom outcomes and enhance client satisfaction, enabling your firm to stay ahead of the competition. The bottom line: There’s no better time than now to explore AI solutions that will empower your legal team for future litigation success.

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Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York-based attorney, author and journalist, and she is the principal legal insight strategist at MyCase, a company that offers legal practice management software for small firms. She is the nationally recognized author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers and is co-author of Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier, both published by the American Bar Association. She writes regular columns for ABAJournal.com and Above the Law, has authored hundreds of articles for other publications, and regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law and emerging technologies. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @nikiblack, or she can be reached at [email protected].

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This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

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Updated Oct. 29 at 9:29 a.m. to clarify wording for the Pre/Dicta litigation analytics software.

Writing plays an expanding role in the evolving legal marketing world, and lawyers have much to learn. We must pivot to produce easily digestible content. To effectively market ourselves and our law firms to clients through law alerts, blogs or other methods, we must stop writing like lawyers and start writing like marketers, journalists or speechwriters.

Directions for doing so abound: Write for an audience of eighth graders, focus on SEO optimization, avoid citations, format with bullet points, etc.

These suggestions add value. That value is limited, however, by a foundational flaw. Advising lawyers to write simplistically and formulaically misses the mark. It fails to recognize that clients hire us because we are legal experts, not because we are marketing experts. When we oversimplify to improve marketability, we strip legal content of the nuance our clients and potential clients expect us to incorporate into our practice. With that in mind, there are several ways to integrate marketing guidance into our writing while still performing our roles as lawyers.

Legal writing training begins in law school, as ABA accreditation criteria includes faculty-supervised first-year and upper-class writing requirements. Many schools add more substantial demands, including writing major articles and papers with extensive one-on-one faculty supervision. Academic journal writing and editing is another format for jargon added to the mix. This education, built upon post-graduation at firms around the country, creates attorney writers.

Some are so well-trained that they cannot help themselves from placing errant commas where none belong or adding unnecessary modifiers for yet further clarification of a three-line email. Nor can they stop themselves from capitalizing the words “plaintiffs” or “defendants.” (Practical note: Capitalize parties in court documents, not articles or blogs.)

Gifted citation checkers, perhaps, many attorney writers are like classically trained chefs who struggle to make a simple grilled cheese sandwich. They command the capacity to communicate with complex legalese but cannot distill legal intricacies into plain English.

And that is where change is required. Taking into account our expertise and understanding of the law, we have to learn how to share our knowledge. That does not mean understating complexities or habitually circulating information following often inapplicable conventions. Instead, we should think through each communication—its intention, substance and implications—and plan accordingly.

Leverage marketing insights

Assuming that you share your legal knowledge and experience without oversimplification, advice from marketing experts—in-house at your firm or outside consultants—can be worthwhile and immensely useful. Here are a few ways to embrace marketing advice without leaving your legal training behind.

1. Show, don’t tell

This old writing adage rings true for lawyers. You cannot advertise yourself as an “expert” without violating professional ethics rules, so use your writing to show your expertise. Include legal jargon and explain it. Breaking down complex legislation or regulations into digestible content will demonstrate your mastery of the materials. For an extra challenge, show that mastery. Graphics, charts and flow diagrams double as effective ways to explain complexities and visual showcases of your expertise.

Publishing well-written, high-quality blogs and articles distinguishes you from your competitors. Many lawyers can summarize the Federal Trade Commission’s most recent rule banning most noncompetes. Still, it takes more experience to successfully address related, more complex questions: How does the rule impact forfeiture provisions and clawbacks—particularly related to ERISA plans? As part of the executive branch, does the FTC even have the constitutional authority to regulate contracts?

2. Use active voice

Passive voice is not a grammatical concern, but it complicates sentence structure and adds extra words. Compare these sentences:

  • “Passive voice is to be avoided by legal writers who wish to achieve success.”

  • “Successful legal writers avoid passive voice.”

All writers benefit from replacing a passive voice with an active one (most of the time), but this is a particularly useful tip for lawyers. To communicate effectively, we should focus on writing simpler sentences—in structure, not content.

The active voice conveys directness and strength, both of which clients and potential clients want to see in their lawyers. Limiting the passive voice will help you demonstrate those qualities in your writing.

3. Know your audience

Clients hire lawyers who are well-prepared and considerate of their time. If you do not take the time to learn about your audience and write accordingly, you will have wasted your clients’ time.

If your distribution list includes primarily general counsels of national REITs, discuss important caselaw and address legal intricacies that they, as attorneys with expertise, will understand and appreciate. Provide links to cases, and consider addressing compelling arguments raised in concurring and dissenting opinions. They will likely appreciate the analysis and the mastery that you convey.

If you are writing for nonlawyers, engaging in esoteric legal analysis may be a waste of their time and yours. But do not treat your nonlawyer readers like they cannot understand legal issues. They can if you explain the issues well. It is your job to represent your clients’ interests, and educating them is an important aspect of that job.

Always use the correct legal terminology (including Latin words), and include definitions where necessary. Give your clients the credit they deserve for being intelligent and educated experts in their fields.

So write for eighth graders when preparing for middle school career day, but write for sophisticated real estate investors when explaining the implications of New York City’s rent regulation laws to institutional clients.

Do not keep a tally of SEO keywords when you write an explanation of the city’s updates to those regulations. While there is a possibility that discounting SEO may impact the analytics of your blog and your ability to reach those seeking content with Google searches (which should be explored further given Google’s March 2024 core update’s impact on SEO keywords—a subject for another column), you are writing to inform your clients. Producing helpful content geared toward those clients will make you a marketing success.

Circling back

In sum, identify your readership and understand the law to communicate effectively. Explain where appropriate but continue to write like a lawyer. And like a classically trained chef simplifying a grilled cheese sandwich, slightly alter the complexity of flavor based on ingredients and customer preferences. But do not use the microwave.

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Jessica Kaplan is the founder of Legally Penned. A 2001 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Kaplan is a litigator-turned-wordsmith providing content and editing services tailored specifically to lawyers and law firms.

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Mind Your Business is a series of columns written by lawyers, legal professionals and others within the legal industry. The purpose of these columns is to offer practical guidance for attorneys on how to run their practices, provide information about the latest trends in legal technology and how it can help lawyers work more efficiently, and strategies for building a thriving business.

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Interested in contributing a column? Send a query to [email protected].

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This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

The pace of technological change over the past year has been fast and furious. It seems that every day there’s a new announcement, with legal technology companies rolling out generative artificial intelligence functionality into their platforms at breakneck speed. Blink, and you’ll miss the latest advancement or news release.

When you’re busy practicing law, keeping track of the evolving technological landscape is challenging even in the best of times. But when there are new products and features added every day along with the release of entirely new categories of software, maintaining your ethical duty of competence can feel like a nearly impossible endeavor.

That’s where industry surveys and reports like the just-released LawPay and MyCase Legal Industry Report 2024 come in. They bridge the knowledge gap by arming you with the information you need to know, enabling your firm’s success in the year to come.

This year’s report was based on survey responses from over 2,600 legal professionals and provides a wealth of information on trending legal technology issues ranging from generative AI understanding and adoption plans to technology implementation hurdles, and the top tools that enable law firm success and profitability. Whether it’s the value of providing flexible payment options to clients or the best law firm functions to outsource, this report has you covered and will provide actionable data that will ensure your decisions will streamline your firm’s operations and lay the groundwork for a profitable 2024.

Generative AI understanding and adoption

The survey data shows that while most legal professionals have some awareness of generative AI, most law firm leaders are on the fence about the how, why and when of generative AI adoption. According to the report, 63% of legal professionals have some level of familiarity with generative AI; however, only 27% of respondents reported that they personally used generative AI tools for work-related purposes, and 24% shared that their firms had adopted legal-specific generative AI software. By comparison, a mere 3% of firms had adopted consumer generative AI tools, highlighting a preference for tools designed with the needs of law firms in mind.

The top use cases reported for generative AI were brainstorming (58%), drafting correspondence (55%), general research (as opposed to legal research) (46%), document drafting (42%), drafting document templates (39%), summarizing documents (38%) and editing documents (34%). The report also includes many specific examples of use cases from legal professionals that range from trial preparation and marketing to law practice management and translation.

Another interesting finding was that respondents who were using generative AI in their practices experienced notable increases in efficiency. More than half of those surveyed (53%) said it increased efficiency somewhat, and for 24%, it increased significantly. In other words, for legal professionals who have adopted generative AI and are using it frequently, their productivity has been dramatically impacted.

There were many concerns cited that prevented generative AI adoption at this early stage. According to the results, lack of knowledge about the technology was a key deterrent to adoption, with 52% choosing that response. Other blockers included ethical issues (39%), lack of trust in generative AI output (39%), the infancy of the technology (33%) and concerns about privilege issues (25%).

But the big question is, will GAI replace lawyers? Survey results showed that 28% of firms planned to replace administrative functions, 18% were targeting legal-specific functions and 13% planned to replace some outsourced functions. A small minority (10%) intended to fully replace an administrative employee, and only 2% were considering replacing a lawyer with generative AI.

Strategies to increase law firm revenue and access to justice

Another key area of focus in this year’s report was how legal software can increase law firm profitability while also providing legal clients with payment flexibility. A variety of legal billing software features were examined to determine how their adoption impacted productivity and cash flow.

For example, online time-tracking tools had a noticeable effect on revenue, with legal professionals who used a time-tracking tool that passively tracked work done in the software captured an additional 579,665 hours over a year, which amounts to an additional $22,425 in billable hours per lawyer (assuming a conservative $330 billable-hour rate).

The data also highlighted how popular online payments have become, with 78% of respondents reporting that their firms now offered this option to clients. By doing so, the firms not only provided clients with a convenient way to pay for legal bills but also increased collection rates. Meanwhile, 19% reported that their firms collected more than an additional $10,000 each month by accepting online payments, 10% collected $8,001 to $10,000 more monthly and 8% collected $6,001 to $8,000.

Another innovative approach to increasing access to legal services adopted by some firms was “Pay Later,” a financial tool that provides clients with the ability to defer the full payment of legal fees while increasing a law firm’s collection rate significantly. According to the survey data, 19% of firms were already offering a “Pay Later” option to clients. Those firms received full payment for legal fees within three days, and 46% reported by offering “Pay Later” to prospective clients, their firms were able to sign on more new cases.

Key law firm management software features and outsourcing services

Finally, the report explored how firms are increasing efficiency by leveraging advanced technologies and outsourcing key law firm operational functions. For example, 58% of respondents’ firms reported using law practice management software with online texting functionality and 44% of those gained one to two additional hours each week, while another 17% saved three to five hours and 9% increased efficiency by five hours weekly.

Another way firms increased efficiency was by using virtual receptionist services, which allowed them to respond to prospective clients’ inquiries at any time, day or night. According to the report, 19% of respondents shared that their firms employed a virtual receptionist service and gained five or more leads each week over a year, while 21% acquired three to five leads and 33% obtained one to two leads.

Last but not least is e-filing. The data showed that 91% of firms can e-file, and they benefit from doing so; 34% reported a one-to-two-hour weekly efficiency increase; 27% gained three to five hours; and 26% saved five or more hours each week.

No matter what your firm’s plans for technology adoption, this report includes data that will inform your purchasing decisions. It offers timely insights into the efficiency drivers and growth opportunities gained from adopting generative AI and other innovative tools. This guidance will aid in choosing software and services that will lay the foundation for law firm growth. Whether it’s leveraging AI to enhance productivity or incorporating new software into your firm that will increase client service and revenue, you’ll find lots of data-driven insights to enable your firm’s strategic technology investments in 2024.

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Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York-based attorney, author and journalist, and she is senior director of subject matter expertise and external education at MyCase, a company that offers legal practice management software for small firms. She is the nationally recognized author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers and is co-author of Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier, both published by the American Bar Association. She writes regular columns for ABAJournal.com and Above the Law, has authored hundreds of articles for other publications, and regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law and emerging technologies. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) @nikiblack, or she can be reached at [email protected].

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This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.