In a recent Forbes Tech article, How Big Data is Disrupting Law Firms and the Legal Profession, Nik Reed (co-founder of Ravel Law) is quoted as saying:
[T]he days when lawyers were all English Literature or philosophy majors are behind us now, my classmates included a lot of people from finance and one who had a PhD in biochemistry from MIT. These are people who are familiar with quantitative analysis and datasets, and they are yearning for richer information sources and better analytics technologies. It probably wouldn’t have gone down very well 30 years ago with the kind of people who were lawyers back then.
Because it’s been about 30 years since I last did legal research as an associate, I think I’m pretty qualified to reply that if cool and effective research aids like Ravel were available and affordable 30 years ago, we would have happily abandoned all of that manual treatise and digest reviewing, the pulling of countless court reporters and advance sheets and the oh-so-tedious manual Shepardizing! The visual strengths of the analytics tools now coming online would have been just as obvious to us back then as they are today. Continue reading “The Headlong Rush Into Analytics”