WE are a perception reality arbitrage firm

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Miami, Premonition is an artificial intelligence system that mines the information in Big Data to determine the effectiveness of individual lawyers. The company possesses the largest litigation database in the world, exceeding the size of every major legal database combined.

The company recently closed a seed funding round at a valuation of $100 million. The analysis conducted by Premonition provides information relative to litigators’ winning percentages before specific judges, including case type, case value and duration. This provides information about which lawyers win in front of which judges on which matter types, but also who is ‘running the clock’ on cases in terms of duration (and who resolves quickly). Premonition’s function is to spot trends and outliers, which it does well as data is ‘smoothed out’ over 1,000s of cases. The process produces better than a 30% improvement for companies who choose lawyers based on the analysis, which shows that some lower-cost lawyers are much more effective in certain types of cases than the most expensive large firm partners. ‘The traditional way individuals and companies select lawyers for litigation is extremely inefficient. Based on advertising or word of mouth, this avoids evaluating the true effectiveness of a lawyer’ (Toby Unwin, Co-Founder and Inventor of Premonition)

Premonition takes public court data from different States, analyses, normalises and standardises it into a single database, using machine reading processes. To date the focus has been on the US, but its data for the UK is growing. Premonition currently holds data for the UK high courts and is in the process of adding tribunals. Trends so far suggest that selections made through an established solicitor-barrister hire relationship result in a 38% worse outcome than a random pick.

Premonition is aimed at the GC market. Run on AWS Cloud, Premonition gives access to data in real time. Corporate clients can buy a one-off data report or they can pay a subscription fee for multiple use. Reports help GC procurement decisions, but can also be a valuable tool for law firms pitching to corporate clients to have stats about incumbent counsel.

In another example, the insurance industry uses software such as Colossus to work out the actuarial value of a claim. Premonition can analyse the judicial value of a claim and win rates so lawyers know when to settle for the actuarial amount and when they could aim for more. Premonition offers a consumer version of this analysis under the name ‘Litigas’. Here consumers can receive free referrals to ‘winning’ lawyers relevant to their location and case.

Source:the law society

You can download the full report here