On March 9, 2022, Lex Machina partnered with the ABA on a CLE webcast called “What Can Legal Analytics Do for Me?” The webcast featured Lex Machina’s in-house counsel Aria Nejad, and the guest speakers included Catherine Bernard (US Litigation Professional Support Lawyer at Mayer Brown), John Gutkoski (Partner at Cesari and McKenna), and Adam Kessel (Partner at Fish & Richardson). On the webcast, the speakers discussed understanding Legal Analytics generally, and specifically how it helps in crafting winning litigation strategies and developing new business. They explored how Legal Analytics makes firms and companies more successful in today’s fiercely competitive legal market.
Adam Kessell noted, “One thing that’s kind of nice about Lex Machina is you get the data and then right from that same tool, you can look down at the individual cases and get the individual case filings. So it’s kind of a one-stop shop for the macro view and then all of the qualitative and anecdotal data.” He added, “I find our clients, particularly the non-lawyer business decision makers, they’re very accustomed to data-driven recommendations.”
Catherine Bernard agreed, observing, “Frankly, a lot of our FPs now have a line item for ‘do you have access to Legal Analytics and how do you use them?’ And we clearly want to be able to answer yes to that. So, it’s becoming more and more of a baseline requirement.” She added, “Now that we have [Lex Machina], we’re clearly never going to go back. [Without Lex Machina], we might have been able to win the pitch, we might have been able to win the matter, but we certainly couldn’t have done it necessarily as quickly, or maybe not with as complete success. If another firm had analytics capability and we didn’t, that could have made the difference.”
Aria Nejad noted, “We had a survey of legal analytics users, and . . . 98% of users said that Legal Analytics is an invaluable or somewhat valuable tool. So once people are actually using the analytics, they’re finding it to be very useful and both users and non-users overwhelmingly recognize the value of the Legal Analytics that it brings to a litigation practice. So even with non-users, if they’re not using Legal Analytics, 80% of them still believe it to be an invaluable tool.”
For more, watch a recording of the webcast on the ABA’s website.