Last month, we blogged about the potential of artificial intelligence stepping up to the bench by predicting judges’ decisions and helping to increase the efficiency of busy courts. We follow up on the potential in these predictions for lawyers’ advantage.

In its recent report, the Wall Street Journal cleverly calls it “Moneyball” for judges — lawyers gaining an edge by using hard data for how judges might rule. This information comes from newly developed tools that have pored over millions of court documents and gathered statistics that offer, for example, the likelihood a case will be dismissed as well as the average wait time until trial. No longer do lawyers have to rely only on anecdotes about judges and their tendencies. Now they have the hard facts to help quantify risks.

Companies offering this service include Lex Machina, Ravel Law and Bloomberg Law. The Wall Street Journal offers multiple examples of this service’s value to lawyers; such as learning that one judge doesn’t like sports analogies or the median trial for a patent case in one district is nearly four years. The tools cut down on time and cost associated with people researching and computing this information.

While there is great potential and excitement around these tools, there’s also caution around the possibility of using them incorrectly, which can lead to false conclusions. Overall, however, hard data is considered the future of litigation.

Speaking of the value of data, our recent webinar on how to move past data collection and make legal metrics count is available to watch on-demand.