Big Data Gets Bigger: 5 Ways to Employ Legal Analytics

Big data is just getting, well, bigger. And while legal technology’s progress has been slow in relation to technology changes in the wider world, legal professionals are increasingly turning to one technique to handle emerging big data challenges of the day.

That approach is data analytics—a practice in which data is extracted for categorization and analysis by a variety of techniques and tools. And just as there is a seemingly endless amount of data, there are seemingly endless ways analytics can be applied. Here are some cases where legal professionals are already beginning to employ analytics:

In these technology-driven times, early case assessment (ECA) has become something of an afterthought, yet with e-discovery costs skyrocketing alongside data proliferation, the practice may soon reinstate its place in the practice of law.

But why ECA? Well, analytics may be playing its hand here. As Gardere Wynne Sewell partner Peter Vogel recently put it, analytics in ECA allows “really robust analysis and evaluation” of data and metadata. This is already playing out in legal services, with platforms like FTI Technology’s Radiance relying on visual analytics for ECA and kCura enabling such capabilities into its Relativity 9.4 platform.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become more connected with our lives, so it was only a matter of time before it became a matter for the legal world to tackle. And just as so many devices encompass IoT, a multitude of challenges are presented by them, among which is discovering and interpreting the variety of data points they generate. For many, an approach lies in analytics.

Finnegan partner Kenie Ho sees analytics as a reliable method for dealing with being “drowned in data.” He told LTN that analytics at a higher level could potentially be used for security challenges as well as discovery challenges, especially when trying to understand data from devices whose useful data isn’t generated in a natural language (e.g., emails in English).

“Perhaps Internet of Things is another step in the process of lawyers letting go,” said William Belt, director of enterprise development at Complete Discovery Source. “They’re going to have to trust analytics and the technology to deal with the ultimately gargantuan volumes that can come out of this brave new world.