Data and AI are reshaping how decisions are made across industries, and the legal sector is no exception. Today’s legal analytics combine advanced data analysis with AI-enabled insights to support...
Lawyers have always valued the importance of grounding their legal arguments in “good law” that is current, on-point and accurately cited. The risks of failing to ensure the integrity of their...
Discover how LexisNexis Protégé™ transforms legal drafting into a strategic collaboration between lawyers and AI—enhancing quality, speed, and defensibility. Protégé...
Discover how LexisNexis Protégé™ is transforming legal drafting with AI. Protégé streamlines repetitive tasks, grounds first drafts in trusted legal sources, and helps...
* The views expressed in externally authored materials linked or published on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Introducing the LexisNexis ® Trust...
* The views expressed in externally authored materials linked or published on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of LexisNexis Legal & Professional.
Data and AI are reshaping how decisions are made across industries, and the legal sector is no exception. Today’s legal analytics combine advanced data analysis with AI-enabled insights to support legal work. You may hear it referred to as litigation analytics, law firm analytics, or legal data analysis. Put simply, legal analytics is the science of drawing insights by mining large volumes of data. In practice, legal analytics tools help legal professionals make data-driven decisions that strengthen strategy and outcomes. That could mean things like knowing the probability of a specific motion outcome, how seemingly unrelated cases connect, or how much a settlement award could be.
Related: You’ve probably noticed that new technologies often incorporate their own specialized dictionary of industry jargon. To help make sense of it all, see:
As mentioned above, legal analytics helps legal professionals incorporate data into their decision making. But that’s a pretty broad statement, so to better understand what that means, let’s explore some specifics.
Truth is, there’s not a single standalone tool that delivers every analytics capability legal professionals may need. Lexis+ AI unifies legal research, analytics, and AI-driven insights in one platform, helping legal professionals find the right insights faster within a connected experience.
Legal analytics help legal professionals bring data and AI-driven insight into every stage of litigation strategy. Rather than relying solely on intuition or anecdotal experience, legal professionals can analyze how judges, courts, counsel, and parties have behaved in similar matters to make more informed decisions.
These insights can help legal professionals assess the likelihood of success on motions, understand how specific judges tend to rule, evaluate opposing counsel strategies, and anticipate how cases may progress over time. By grounding strategy in historical patterns and outcomes, legal teams can plan more effectively and advise clients with greater confidence.
Analytics can also apply predictive language analytics to judicial opinions and legal text, enabling legal professionals to identify which arguments, phrasing, and authorities are most likely to resonate with a specific judge, while reducing time spent on research, so they can focus on refining arguments and preparing for hearings.
Beyond courtroom dynamics, legal analytics provide critical visibility into outcomes. By analyzing verdict and settlement data, legal professionals can better estimate potential case value, assess financial risk, and support negotiations with data-backed expectations.
Together, these capabilities help legal teams allocate resources more effectively, prepare more persuasive arguments, and guide clients with clarity throughout the lifecycle of a matter.
At the core of legal analytics is data. These tools rely on large, structured collections of legal information, including court records, filings, opinions, verdicts, settlements, and related legal documents, to surface meaningful insights.
Scale matters, but quality matters even more. The accuracy and usefulness of analytics depend not just on how much data is available, but on how reliable, comprehensive, and current that data is. Well curated datasets allow analytics tools to identify patterns, trends, and tendencies that support confident decision making.
Equally important is data integrity. Analytics systems depend on clean, well validated data to produce trustworthy results. Inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent data can undermine insights and lead to flawed conclusions.
For that reason, legal professionals evaluating legal analytics should understand where the data comes from, how it is sourced, and how it is reviewed and maintained. A strong analytics foundation is built on transparent data practices and rigorous quality controls, ensuring insights legal professionals rely on are credible and defensible.
Legal analytics deliver value well beyond surface-level statistics. For legal professionals, analytics transform large volumes of legal data into practical insight that supports smarter, faster decision making throughout a matter.
With access to analytics-driven insight, legal professionals can better evaluate the strength of a case, assess potential outcomes, and determine how to allocate time and resources effectively. Whether estimating the likelihood of success on a motion, understanding potential exposure in a dispute, or supporting internal risk assessments, analytics help reduce uncertainty and support informed judgment.
Visualization and analysis tools further enhance this value by revealing relationships between parties, cases, and legal issues that may not be immediately obvious. These insights help legal teams identify connections, focus research efforts, and quickly interpret complex information.
Ultimately, the value of legal analytics shows up in everyday practice. Legal professionals save time, sharpen strategy, improve communication with stakeholders, and make more confident decisions. Across private practice, corporate legal departments, and public sector organizations, analytics help teams work more efficiently and deliver better-informed outcomes.
Not likely. What legal analytics does is encourage legal professionals to take a more data-informed approach to decision making. Rather than replacing judgment or experience, analytics complement them by providing additional insight to support strategy and planning.
As the legal profession evolves, so do the skills that legal professionals bring to their work. While traditional strengths like legal reasoning, writing, and advocacy remain essential, there is growing value in understanding how to interpret data, evaluate trends, and apply analytics-driven insight in context.
This shift benefits both legal professionals and the organizations they serve. Leveraging data to inform decisions has already proven effective in many scenarios, helping teams reduce uncertainty, allocate resources more effectively, and prepare with greater confidence.
While fully autonomous legal decision making remains unlikely, analytics and AI are already helping legal professionals work smarter and faster. As these technologies continue to advance, their role will only expand, reinforcing analytics as a trusted component of today’s legal work.
To support confident litigation decision making, LexisNexis delivers these complementary litigation capabilities within the Lexis+ AI platform, bringing research, analytics, and insight together in one connected experience.