Herbert Smith Rolls Out UK Litigation Prediction System Solomonic

Global legal services business, Herbert Smith Freehills, has successfully completed the first stage of their development partnership with English law litigation prediction system, Solomonic, and have agreed a deal to roll out its analytics platform across their UK disputes team.

This is a major step forward for English legal analytics, as although there are some excellent systems in the US, including companies ranging from Gavelytics, Fastcase, and Casetext, to the American offerings of giants such as LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, when it comes to English law systems offering complex NLP-driven predictive capabilities in the litigation data field there has been far less activity.

Herbert Smith has also long been known as a leader in litigation, so, for it to roll out the system is a major coup for the start-up and probably one of the best signals they could have hoped for that leading dispute lawyers see value in the system.

But, what does it do? This is how Solomonic explains it: ‘The right data, rigorously analysed, enhances the quality of decision-making. Aggregated over the lifetime of a case, that produces a powerful incremental advantage, allowing litigators to do a better job predicting outcomes – and improving them.’

For example, its commercial module collates the case data from all decisions of a commercial nature taken by judges currently assigned to the English Commercial Court, including those decisions made in other court divisions. Users are able to view the data as a whole, or zero in to focus on a particular judge or case.

By analysing this data, litigators can then make some educated decisions about what may be their best strategy should a case come to court and end up before one of the analysed judges.

Donny Surtani, a Partner at Herbert Smith Freehills, said: ‘We are very excited to be further cementing our relationship with Solomonic. The use of litigation data and analytics is an important tool – shaping the future of how litigation is practised.’

The company also welcomed the decision of UK Research and Innovation to help fund a partnership between Solomonic and Warwick Business School to the tune of £300,000, to develop the machine learning capabilities which will drive its analytics (see full story here).

Professor Joe Nandhakumar from Warwick Business School, said: ‘We are thrilled to be collaborating with Solomonic. They have the vision, the legal expertise and the execution capability to really turn machine learning technology into a high value reality for practitioners.’

Gideon Cohen, Solomonic co-founder, concluded: ‘2019 is off to a great start. Herbert Smith Freehills are top ranked globally for their litigation work, and we are very excited to be deepening our relationship with them. In particular, we look forward to working with them to mould the new offerings we are developing for settlement data and Chancery division judgment analytics.’