It is hard to overstate the rise in disputes-focused technology in recent years – a trend underwritten by the dire need to streamline burdensome and expensive disclosure processes.
A major milestone was reached in June, when Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (BCLP) declared it had become the first firm to win a significant court victory on the back of using document review technology. A notable result, but the real victory came with the cost savings: BCLP partner Oliver Glynn-Jones said that the technology could save as much as a third of the costs of a normal disclosure exercise. Simmons & Simmons litigation partner Ed Crosse added to the hype when he told Legal Business this tech had saved his client somewhere in the region of £2m in a single matter.
The most well-established player in this space is Relativity, a document management system that was first offered as an in-house tool outside the US by Simmons in 2008. Mishcon de Reya chief technology officer Nick West describes the firm’s lawyers as ‘Relativity people’ and says the tool is ‘very good at managing large document sets’.
However, in that sense, Relativity is slightly more of a blunt object than newer providers that offer more niche services. West cites Everchron, a system allowing users to share documents with third parties and gradually mark them as relevant or irrelevant. Other products and providers on the market that perform a similar function include HighQ, CS Disco, Everlaw, Nexis and Navigant.
Paul Baker, a financial markets litigation partner and head of e-discovery at Simmons, says that every firm is incorporating discovery technology into its litigation service, but only Simmons, Mishcon and Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) offer an in-house service.
‘It creates so many more efficiencies when the people using the technology understand the litigation process.’
Paul Baker, Simmons & Simmons
‘We have done it because it’s a very successful team. It creates so many more efficiencies when the people using the technology understand the litigation process.’
News in October that artificial intelligence platform Luminance is moving into the e-discovery sector further confirmed how fruitful the market is. Luminance had already become an established name in M&A due diligence and in-house compliance. But its new product, Luminance Discovery, is slated to ‘actively learn from the decisions made by the litigator’ throughout the review process, so it ‘is constantly improving its understanding of the documents it encounters’.
A more recent branch of litigation tech concerns predictive analytics. Broadly speaking, these tools attempt to process data in order to inform litigation outcomes and tactics. One of the more publicised tools to make waves recently in the market is Solomonic, software that analyses a pre-loaded database of previous judgments to predict how a piece of litigation may play out. For example, if a particular judge has shown form for ruling a particular way in a certain type of dispute, the system would flag such behaviour, informing a litigator’s decision on whether to pursue a case or settle.
This year Solomonic has struck up partnerships with both HSF and disputes specialist Stewarts. Both tie-ups will see the firms use the technology on relevant cases – a win for Solomonic in terms of marketing and a win for the firms who get a potential first-mover advantage.
While an advocate of such tools, West warns that this tech pales in comparison to US equivalents, where all legal proceedings go into a central repository called PACER. Universal filing of this type does not happen with UK courts and, therefore, the data accessible by tools such as Solomonic is always limited: ‘Until you solve that problem, your data is inherently restricted.’
Of course, Solomonic is not the only tech of its kind on the market, with predictive analytics being particularly useful to insurance firms dealing with high-volume claims. Kennedys, for example, has its own in-house litigation tool, KLAiM, which helps quickly settle straightforward insurance claims where primary liability has been admitted.
US-based Lex Machina has a similar model to Solomonic, taking advantage of the greatly enhanced pool of data at its disposal, primarily thanks to PACER.