Judicata’s New Tool Wants to Help Your Brief Succeed in Court
The new tool, Clerk, looks over briefs to determine whether their arguments, drafting and context are likely to find favor with judges.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have drawn enormous excitement and development in the legal sector throughout the year, and applications have tended to revolve around e-discovery, contract analysis and data analytics.
In a blog post published last week, legal research firm Judicata announced it would bring its machine-learning analysis to bear around legal brief assessment. Its new tool, Clerk, analyzes briefs against data drawn from the company’s legal research database to assess the strength of its arguments, drafting and context.
“Because we have a map of the law and because we are able to understand these documents, we are able to figure out what are the characteristics of winning and losing legal briefs and help lawyers make their briefs better,” Judicata co-founder Itai Gurari told LTN.
Here’s a look at the new tool:
Who it serves: Right now, the product is tailored toward California-based practitioners, but later versions aim to expand Clerk’s reach to attorneys working under other states’ laws and on federal matters. In the future, Gurari said that the company aims for the tool to be as broadly applicable as possible for attorneys looking to get a brief approved. “We’ve tried to make tools that are broadly usable both to small and solo attorneys, all the way to large law firms,” he said.
Additionally, Judicata product manager Beth Hoover pointed out Clerk could serve as “a strategy tool to pick apart what the opponent might be relying on” in their opposition brief, which may help attorneys get the upper hand in crafting a response. “They can use this on their opponents briefs to get a really good idea of what the law is surrounding that brief,” she explained.
What it does: The Clerk tool compares a given brief to its historical data and scores it in three key areas: arguments, drafting and context. Within each of these categories, the tool highlights specific action items that attorneys may want to revise or be aware of to improve the potential for success.
How much nuance does this thing have? More than you would’ve guessed. Theoretically, a tool promising this kind of analysis could just compare a given brief to a data set on how well a given argument or contextual consideration fared. But in crafting the tool, Judicata’s team seems to have looked at a few different nuance factors that may give its assessments a little more weight. For example, the tool will assess not only the strength of an argument, but also how well it has been received across time.
Will lawyers embrace it? Although attorney reticence toward technology altogether has quickly waned in the face of efficiency and cost-reduction demands from clients, there remains a fair amount of concern from attorneys about technology that does some form of actual legal analysis. Clerk’s assessments of what arguments and contexts could hold most water in court fall squarely into this category.
Gurari argued, however, that Clerk is intended to supplement, not supplant, attorney oversight and review. Indeed, the tool is aimed at helping attorneys accomplish the full breath of tasks around crafting their briefs, but may not have the bandwidth to get to in a time crunch. “These are best practices. What we find is [attorneys are] often failing to do these things not for lack of ability, but lack of effort. It takes a lot of time,” Gurari said.
Originally published at www.legaltechnews.com.
