Predictive Analytics Are Already a Staple in Legal. But Is Their Future a Sure Bet?

Law.com interviewed Paul-Erik Veel to get his expert insight on the future of predictive analytics in the legal industry and to discuss Lenczner Slaght's Data-Driven Decisions program.

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To be sure, such litigation-based predictive analytics are becoming increasingly common in the market.

Canada-based litigation boutique Lenczner Slaght launched a “Data-Driven Decisions” program last year that determines the likelihood of certain outcomes in three Canada court systems.

While some litigation-based predictive analytics tools can be more advanced than others, they’re not generally prohibitive to create so long as one has access to court data. “One of the not so dirty little secrets of the machine learning community is that there’s a lot of machine learning and predictive analytics models that are not themselves particularly complex,” said Lenczner Slaght partner Paul-Erik Veel. “Once you have the data … a skilled person can generate predictions and analysis very quickly.”