I have talked before about legal tech products that either try to do too much or are so nonintuitive that lawyers who bill by the hour won’t use them. One problem often begets the other: in attempting to do too much, a product often becomes too cumbersome to learn and use. I have found examples though of legal tech developers that get it right. Casepoint, for example, which I have written about before. More recently, LexisNexis’ Product Liability Navigator has found the sweet spot as well.
Add to these examples the platform being offered by a company called Trellis. Trellis provides a litigation data analytics product that at first blush appears similar to those offered by the bigger players like LexisNexis (Lex Machina) or Thomson Reuters. So when I talked to founder and CEO Nicole Clark recently, I was a bit skeptical whether there was room in the market for another and smaller competitor.
I found Clark to cordial and articulate with an excellent command of the problems most litigators face in mining state court data. Underneath her pleasant dement lies a laser vision and a steely resolve. Clark and Trellis are singularly focused not on the ocean of litigation data but only on a segment of it: state trial court proceedings. Yes, the big players have been eyeing this segment and making inroads here. But no, none is focused only on state trial courts to the exclusion of anything else. That’s what makes Trellis different and competitive. Says Clark, “We want Trellis to be the Google of state trial court analytics.”
Clark related how she came up with the idea for Trellis. As a young associate, she was given the assignment to write a brief on a motion pending before a state court
