Want to know what litigation analytic product to use?
Some 27 librarians tested 7 platforms of the most well litigation analytics providers to see which one was the best. They presented their findings at the American Association of Law Librarians (AALL) annual meeting this week in Washington D.C.
The platforms evaluated were those offered by Bloomberg Law, Docket Alarm, Docket Navigator, Lex Machina, Lexis Content, Monitor Suite and WestLaw Edge. The test panel consisted of law librarians who asked the platforms sixteen real world questions. The questions were the kind most legal professionals would expect litigation analytics would be able to answer, like how many times a certain lawyer had appeared before a certain judge or how many class action matters a firm had defended. The answers, of course, could only be derived from federal court data.
The short answers: these platforms do slightly different things and work in slightly different ways so there is no real winner. And the platforms work best when they are run by an experienced, well trained people who then manually review and analyze the results.
There are very real differences in the platforms: the reviewers got 7 different answers to every question they asked, none of which was completely correct.
Here’s my 5 take aways from the competition:
Take Away Number 1: There is no one size fits all analytics platform: the best platform to use depends heavily on the type of case and the budget you have. There are very real differences in the platforms: the reviewers got 7 different answers to every question they asked, none of which was completely correct. And there was a big difference in ease of use and adaptability of the platform to the problem presented among the programs. The Bloomberg product, for example, was the easiest