Case Prediction Booming as Stewarts Pilots New Solomonic System

London-based litigation firm, Stewarts, has announced that it is piloting a new English law case prediction system, Solomonic, which has former Freshfields managing partner, Ian Terry, as an advisor.

The new legal tech company provides lawyers with the ability to make data-led predictions on commercial and tax-related disputes by tapping previous case information to give a steer on possible outcomes for a new, similar case.

This is a field that has been pioneered in the US for some time and we have also seen companies such as CaseCrunch and Sibyl AI, among others in the UK, also develop systems that can predict certain types of case outcome.

We have also seen law firms such as Kennedys develop their own home-made litigation analysis systems for their insurance clients. And in France, the pioneering Predictice has led the field for French case prediction.

And of course, we cannot forget the move recently by Thomson Reuters to upgrade its Westlaw platform with NLP/ML tools that can also provide some predictive capabilities.

All in all this suggests case prediction is booming as an area for legal tech developers. It also makes particular good sense for the UK to develop this area given that London is a global centre for commercial litigation where many of the world’s largest companies come to resolve their disputes.

What Solomonic does is the following: its commercial module collates the case data from all decisions of a commercial nature taken by judges currently assigned to the Commercial Court, including those decisions made in other court divisions, while the Tax Module collates the case data from all Upper Tier Tax Tribunal decisions (in England & Wales).

It then lets you:

Commenting on the pilot, Julian Chamberlayne, Stewarts’ KM & Compliance Partner said: ‘A key part of litigating successfully is making the best possible decisions on everything from tactics to personnel, from arguments to settlement or taking a case to trial. The outcome of cases is influenced by the cumulative effect of those decisions.’

‘The use of data extracted from judgments, and smart analytics derived from that data, is one more way to supplement our expertise and further enhance our innovative approach to litigation – including litigation funding,’ he added.

Note – litigation funding. Tapping data here makes perfect sense. If a litigation funder is effectively taking a bet on a case, just like betting on a horse in a race, then having as much hard data as possible is a huge benefit.

Solomonic said that they see this as an opportunity to work with the UK’s largest litigation-only law firm to bring significant value and insight to the development of its analytics and research offering, which is planned for commercial launch to the wider legal sector in the autumn.

Solomonic Co-Founder, Gideon Cohen, said: ‘We are delighted to be working so closely with Stewarts. They are driven by a desire to get the best possible outcomes for their clients, and we believe that our innovative smart data and research tools will provide them with significant value.’

And, behavioural scientist, Dr Henry Stott, Co-Founder of Solomonic, concluded: ‘We have developed a meticulous process for extracting high quality data from court documents and have observed reliable and interesting patterns within that data which support statistical and algorithmic modelling.  This has yielded significant insights for litigators.’

One last item of note is two of the founders are lawyers: Gideon Cohen, is a barrister at top commercial chambers, One Essex Court; and David Cohen, was a partner at Norton Rose for 15 years. And, as mentioned, a key advisor is Ian Terry, the former managing partner of Freshfields, the global law firm.

Good luck to Solomonic. Artificial Lawyer looks forward to hearing how the pilot goes.