Litigation Analytics and Outcome Forecasting

Clients ask lawyers the same four questions: Will we win? How long will it take? What is it worth? What will it cost? For most of the history of the profession the answers came from instinct, sometimes excellent and often overconfident. Litigation analytics answers them with data from past cases, and done honestly it makes advice more consistent, more explainable and less prone to wishful thinking. Done carelessly it is worse than instinct, because numbers look authoritative. Case data is full of traps: the cases that settle vanish, the cases still open look as if they never end, small samples masquerade as laws and the facts that mattered most were never recorded. This course teaches the work and the honesty that goes with it. It starts with what analytics can and cannot claim, then builds and audits the table of cases; reads win rates with their intervals, denominators and the paradoxes that catch careful analysts; estimates durations with open cases handled properly; turns past awards into value ranges that are not distorted by a few giant figures; forecasts a case from a base rate and scores the forecasts afterwards; and finally deals with the analysis of courts, judges and opponents, where the statistics are weak and the law and ethics bite. A capstone advises an invented client with a messy table and a decision to make. It builds on Legal Risk Quantification and Matter Economics and Pricing, and every case is invented.