Gavelytics, the California-based judicial analytics platform is set to expand its offering to New York, Texas and Illinois, as it steadily builds out its coverage across America.
For readers outside the US, the scale of what they are doing may not be immediately clear. However, IAALS found that: ‘More than 100 million cases are filed each year in US state trial courts, while roughly 400,000 cases are filed in federal trial courts. There are approximately 30,000 state judges, compared to 1,700 federal judges.’
The reality is that building a picture of how judges behave across the country is a gigantic undertaking. Gavelytics is therefore taking the task on one piece at a time, often choosing the areas with a high population, such as California and soon New York. At present the company is making active use of around 16 million court records to better understand and find insights into the actions of American judges. This work has been boosted by a $3.2m funding round last year.
In addition the company, which is located in Los Angeles, has greatly added to its coverage of trial court dockets, rulings, and other litigation documents for Northern California with the addition of Alameda County. The company has also already made inroads into Florida judicial data. New York is planned to be available by November, with Texas and Illinois to follow.
But what does it do?
Gavelytics uses AI tech to help lawyers quickly identify judges’ tendencies, and then determine if they will be favourable to their clients.
The technology highlights the differences among judges by tracking how each of them tends to rule on various types of motions, how quickly they move through their docket, and how frequently lawyers file peremptory challenges against them.
This allows users to:
- learn whether a certain judge is good or bad for their client;
- the rate at which other lawyers file peremptory challenges against a judge;
- how a judge tends to rule on more than 100 types of motions;
- if a judge is more likely to favour specific types of litigants;
- and how a judge’s workload might impact the speed at which litigation proceeds.
Gavelytics Founder and CEO, Rick Merrill, a former Big Law litigator, said: ‘Law firms with significant California state litigation can remove much of the guesswork from their legal matters with Gavelytics. The addition of Alameda County state court data allows Northern California law firms to be more productive and more prepared for what to expect from judges and opposing counsel.’
The platform is also continually developing new insights into this judicially-focused data. Artificial Lawyer recently visited Gavelytics at its HQ in Los Angeles. Two short videos featuring Gavelytics CEO, Rick Merrill, are below that give a walkthrough of the platform along with one of its new features that is currently in Beta.
If you’d like to know more, check out the videos below. (Note: these were shot on an iPhone, but hopefully provide some useful insights into the platform. The first one is about 6 mins, the second about 5 mins.)