Maria Haymandou’s latest blog post!
I recently came across an article about the importance of big data in law firms. Since the beginning, law has been a data-driven business. A good attorney, librarian or judge has to know how to draw from up to thousands of potentially relevant cases and then synthesize knowledge insight from potentially hundreds of years of legal history. In the digital age, law firms have to know how to navigate a near-infinite amount of digital information. Firms that can master this new data-driven environment will have a better competitive edge.
There are about about 100 million cases brought to U.S. courts every year. And most of them, if not all of them, can be accessed over the Internet. This means that the amount of data that legal experts need to access is growing rapidly every day, and providers of legal information have to step up to the plate. 20 years ago, a subject-related searches returned a few dozen cases; now, it could deliver thousands.
No matter how much legal information you have, it takes time to sift through all of it. It often takes a lot of trial and error to refine a search and sift through the plethora of information out there. Legal information vendors are currently working hard to not just add available information, but also deliver it quickly. Today, advanced legal search supercomputers can perform up to 5,000 transactions per second.
With so much data available and updates constantly coming in, analysis is even more important. New tools to work with all of this legal information are helping legal professionals master huge amounts of court information and find new insights.
Maria Haymandou 