I was brought up in a rural part of the United Kingdom during those dark pre-internet days, you remember, when you had to rely on landlines, newspapers and travel agents.

It was also a place and a time when we had to accept the local lawyers we were given and I’ll be frank with you, they weren’t always of the highest calibre.

But even today, with the internet transforming buyers reach and choice, beyond immediate geographic boundaries, the process remains unsatisfactory because, the market remains remarkably opaque.  Most lawyers are still instructed on the basis of network recommendations and word of mouth anecdote.  Hardly the most effective gauge as to whether they’re the right lawyer for your case and indeed, whether they’re actually any good when it comes to representing your interests in court?

But times they are a changing and artificial intelligence is providing the breakthrough and transparency the market has been craving.

Here at Premonition, we’ve created the world’s largest litigation database that is shining a light into the dark corners of lawyer performance, and you’ll be surprised by some of the results.

And there is a huge amount of data out there.  In the USA alone there are over 3,000 independent court houses operating in a fractured network that barely talks to each other, and they’re handling 40,000+ cases per day.

So having dealt with the legal system for many years and like most, finding it an utterly exasperating process to find a good lawyer, we decided to take action.   We taught an artificial intelligence system to read every case and figure out who won and who lost in each one.  We then crunched this information into easy to consume data that enables us (and our customers) to find out which lawyers, win which cases, in front of which judges.

By doing this, we have created a very, very unfair advantage in litigation by providing a perception reality arbitrage.   Aggregating this huge amount of data enables us to discover the reality behind lawyer performance and to understand the differences between how certain lawyers are perceived, versus how good they actually are.

Imagine that?

No longer having to instruct lawyers blind or accept their billboard claims, adwords boasts or ticker tape procession of discredited peer reviews.

We now have a level of visibility that helps illustrate that the lawyer who charges higher than the market rate, on the basis of a perceived expertise, is actually not very successful in court.

Conversely, you can discover where real value exists by finding high performing, but more cost effective alternatives.  In the commercial world this is dynamite because we’re starting to illustrate something available in most other buying scenarios and that is, the value proposition of suppliers.

In the legal world, it’s unprecedented.   Celebrating the best performing lawyers, whilst holding the bad ones accountable.

The blindfold has been lifted for buyers of legal services as now, you can instruct great lawyers based on data, rather than suffer mediocre ones based on anecdote.