What is Legalytics?

There are tons of talking heads that provide legal analysis. You can turn to the left, right, and center and there are pundits who speak to your political profile. Legalytics is something different. It aims to provide balanced analysis of the law but equally important is that it strives to provide a different perspective than you will find anywhere else.

The legal industry is in flux. It is adjusting to AI, big data, and modern technologies and methodologies. Legalytics’ focus is a data driven approach to law. Articles contain detailed analyses, oftentimes steeped in statistics and analytics, providing an alternative perspective that is not elsewhere available. The statistics are and will be simple enough for any reader to understand.

Why Legalytics?

Analytics exist in almost every industry. Adam first began paying attention to analytics and statistical comparisons with respect to baseball, the first professional sport where teams utilized analytics to improve decision making (or at least where there was largescale coverage of the impact of analytics). Now there is an annual sports analytics conference at MIT that appeal to sports fans and statisticians alike.

Currently everything from medical professionals to consumer behavioralists to economists use analytics to make more efficient, effective, and strategic decisions and ultimately to improve techniques and increase profit.

There are some analytics currently accessible in law in off the shelf measures that are behind large paywalls and are designed for attorneys to use in particular situations where they want to make the best decisions on the margins. Generally these relate to timetables for judges’ decisions at the trial level. The goal of Legalytics is to leverage analytics and to show how they may help everyone understand the legal landscape through a comparative lens. It is to showcase applications, educate others, and to provide access to practitioners, scholars, and the interested public with resources answering new and innovative questions.

For those that have enjoyed Empirical SCOTUS the methodologies in Legalytics are similar but the applications are much more varied. The fodder for analysis on this site will be both state and federal courts from the trial court level up through appeals and petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court. The data will be much more extensive and time consuming to collect. This leads into the reason for paid subscriptions. While I will still provide Empirical SCOTUS posts for free, having paid subscriptions allows me more time to research and develop data for each post as well as to pay for resources needed to produce, organize, and synthesize the data.

What to Expect

Coming full circle, the content on Legalytics is diverse and will be multifaceted. Most newsletters will contain multiple sections including something for those with little legal knowledge (a case explainer), a data driven analysis of a research question, and some general analytics of judges and practicing attorneys. There will be a smattering of content particular to law students, lawyers, judges, those with a general political interest, and those that want to begin learning about the courts and their role in interpreting the law. The gist is that this should be accessible to almost everyone from high school students on up with a wide range of court-related content. As the audience develops, I’ll tailor the material towards subscribers’ interests. The content will also build over time with the addition of a podcast and more.