Trellis Releases ‘Law Firm Intelligence’ Providing Insights into Major US Law Firms for the First Time

USA/Canada News

31
Jul
2023

Editor

Trellis Research Inc. (“Trellis”), a comprehensive AI-powered state court research and analytics platform, recently announced the release of its Law Firm Intelligence product. The solution provides visibility into the competitive market landscape of major law firms across the nation.

The new product “allows users to parse through state court trial data through the lens of a specific firm — either their own, a competitor, or [a corporation’s] outside counsel", noted Cassandre Coyer, Legal Technology reporter at ALM. “The holy grail has always been trying to understand law firms at the trial court level through the work and cases of all of their litigators, says Nicole Clark, CEO and co-founder of Trellis. “Really giving them the power to understand themselves, and their peers.”

With Law Firm Intelligence (LFI) firms can now assess themselves internally, their business and new case growth over time, their experience and market growth in particular practice areas or regions, even their motion practice performance before certain judges — all based on the state trial court numbers. This level of internal insight has never been possible before because this data was so fragmented and never structured at the law firm level. These insights allow partners and marketing departments to see where their firm is actually differentiated in the market, based purely on data. Firms can see where they excel in comparison to the market or specific competitors. These metrics can then be highlighted in marketing materials, and pitch decks, to give partners the data they need to finally demonstrate to clients why their firm is the right choice.

In addition to internal benchmarking, law firms can now deep dive on their direct competitors and discover market and revenue opportunities that might be hiding in plain sight. How does their case growth over the last year stack up against other AM100s? What practice areas are leading their competitors to recent growth? Who are their closest competitors’ largest clients? Understanding these metrics allows firms to assess the competitive landscape in a more holistic view, to not only identify areas for improvement, but identify areas for revenue growth.

While Marketing and BD teams stay busy helping bring in new business, litigators can use LFI to make strategic decisions in their active cases by region or practice area. Does their opposing counsel have expertise in a particular practice areas or case type. Do they have experience in this region, or before this judge? While the aggregate data allows quick insights, the underlying data (the cases and documents powering the analytics) is available to dive deeper on every page. They can learn from their opposing counsel’s prior cases, their dispositive motion grant rates, their common case resolutions. When they find past cases on point, they can dig into the actual motions they filed.

Finally, in addition to use by law firms BD and litigation teams, corporate counsel can now use Law Firm Intelligence to make data-backed business outside counsel decisions. Corporate legal teams can evaluate their panel counsel’s expertise and performance in the state trial courts with an eye towards hard data, in addition to common soft factors like trust, communication, and existing relationship. Understanding metrics on each of their current law firms will help GC’s and Heads of Litigation choose the right firm for each case type. They can see their ongoing state trial cases by firm, and even learn what other client’s make up their biggest book of business. For every metric reviewed (for instance, the number of cases where their panel counsel has gone up against the same opposing counsel), they can see the actual dockets and documents supporting the metric. They can see who the partner or associates were on those previous cases, and specifically request the attorneys with expertise to be assigned to the new matter. With Law Firm Intelligence, corporate counsel and legal departments can finally leverage hard data to make more informed decisions about the handling and management of their portfolio of state court litigation.

“Trellis' new law firm (LFI) analytics feature provides insights into state court practice that no one could really get before now," remarked Joe Patrice, Senior Editor at Above the Law. "There’s never a good excuse to avoid gathering more information. After years and years of lawyers struggling to untangle state court systems, Trellis has digitized ample data to get inside some state court black boxes."

“Our clients, particularly our AM100s and legal departments have been asking for this product for a long time.” Said Clark. “We are so proud to finally deliver this solution to our incredibly innovative customers … We are even more proud to deliver these law firm insights with complete transparency. So much new technology and so many AI products require a kind of blind trust from users, without information on how the model works, or where answers and visualizations are coming from. Trellis is different because unlike most companies, we have the law firms’ underlying court data. We aren’t relying exclusively on other sources. With Law Firm Intelligence, we’ve worked incredibly hard to empower our users with full transparency, down to the source document. Law Firm Intelligence isn’t just a solution to a math problem, every step of the way, it shows its work. We can provide law firms with incredible insights on the market, themselves, and their peers and we don’t have to ask litigators for their trust, with the underlying data, and this level of transparency, we can build it.”