The Quantification of Law: Counting, Predicting, and Valuating

Alice Granada Viana Ribeiro

doi:10.5204/lthj.1966

Abstract

Legal reasoning is increasingly quantified. Developers in the market and public institutions in the legal system are making use of massive databases of court opinions and other legal communications to craft algorithms to assess the effectiveness of legal arguments or predict court judgments; tasks that were once seen as the exclusive province of seasoned lawyers’ obscure knowledge. New legal technologies promise to search heaps of documents for useful evidence, and to analyze dozens of factors to quantify a lawsuit’s odds of success. Legal quantification initiatives depend on the availability of reliable data about the past behavior of courts that institutional actors have attempted to control. The development of initiatives in legal quantification is visible as public bodies craft their own tools for internal use and access by the public, and private companies create new ways to valorize the “raw data” provided by courts and lawyers by generating information useful to the strategies of legal professionals, as well as to the investors that re-valorize legal activity by securitizing legal risk through litigation funding. The article The Quantification of Law: Counting, Predicting, and Valuating by Rafael Viana Ribeiro (Law, Technology and Humans, 3, no 1 (2021): 51-67. https://doi.org/10.5204/lthj.1603) was originally published on March 2, 2021. The author name has been changed at the request of the author. The correction notice can be found at https://doi.org/10.5204/lthj.1965

Highlights

The Many Goals of the Quantification of Law[1]On the morning of August 30, 2019, I attended an event titled Technology and Access to Judiciary Branch Data,[2] held at the São Paulo Lawyer’s Association.[3]
Legal quantification initiatives depend on the availability of reliable data about the past behavior of courts that institutional actors have attempted to control
Association. 4 Conselho Nacional de Justiça is an administrative entity belonging to the Brazilian Judiciary Branch that is headed by the President of the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF)

Summary

Introduction

On the morning of August 30, 2019, I attended an event titled Technology and Access to Judiciary Branch Data,[2] held at the São Paulo Lawyer’s Association.[3]. The source of the “data” in question includes an ever-increasing number of procedural documents, such as court decisions, parties’ submissions and evidence, as well as metadata provided by courts’ electronic filing systems on meta-procedural information, such as dates, cases’ “fields” of law (e.g., civil law, criminal or tax law), and document authorship.[15] Using this and all other information available on the behavior of parties and judges, attorneys try to predict the future and strategize, corporations standardize their interactions with the law to the point of treating proceedings in bulk as risks to be pooled efficiently, “lawyers-turned-entrepreneurs” aggregate legal risk into financial assets,[16] and researchers and activists decry the “biases” of a legal system that comprises too many judges and too many lawsuits for any one team of human scholars to analyze manually.[17] Faced with this demand for legal numbers, technologists and investors in Brazil and worldwide have developed a market to provide quantified pictures of law, harnessing technologies and concepts from fields such as statistics and probability, computer science, linguistics,[18] econometrics,[19] and even formal logic.[20]. I consider how these technologies, which provide novel ways of processing legal information, are used to help evaluate legal risk and create “assets” from legal uncertainty, leading to new ways of creating value atop legal disputes or valorizing law.[28]

From Jurimetrics to Prediction

A Market for Legal Numbers

Evaluating and Valorizing Law

Findings

Conclusion