Judicata’s Clerk offers so much advanced analysis, that it almost scares me. After Judicata founder Itai Gurari, gave me a demo of Clerk I suggested that he needed to put a banner across the top of the screen reminding associates that they still needed to read cases and draw their own conclusions. You load a brief into the platform and Clerk delivers a multi-dimensional critique of the brief supported by a raft of suggestions and analytics.

Gurari has described Clerk as “moneyball for motions. ”Judicata’s Clerk has ingested “thousands of pages of legal text and millions of case data points in order to place each brief in context and provide actionable insights.” Different motions have distinct probabilities of being granted in a particular court or by a particular judge. Judicata offers an impressive array of document assessments.

Gurari built Clerk based on the assumption that associates would like to have an easy way to get insight into the strength to weaknesses of their arguments.

Have you cited the best cases? Do you have the right ratio of cases supporting your argument and against your arguments? Are any of the cases cited have negative history or have they been granted appeal? Are you misquoting your precedents? These are only a few of the issues that a Clerk report will highlight.

How it Works

Upload a brief into Clerk and Clerk runs an analysis which grades your brief on the following criteria:

• Arguments:  assess the type, strength, balance and bias of the arguments presented in the brief.
• Drafting: Covers the quotation and attribution accuracy of referenced text, and the strength of the briefs supporting precedent.
• Context: considers cases with similar causes of action, procedural postures, facts and judge.

It is impossible to ignore the similarity to the Casetext CARA platform. You upload a brief and in a few seconds, you get results.  CARA provides new suggested cases which have not been included in your brief. Judicata delivers a result assessing the quality form and substance in your brief.

Key Facts about Clerk

• Clerk is currently limited to California case law.

• Document types which can be loaded into Clerk are: .doc and text searchable .pdf files.

• Briefs are transmitted using a secure encrypted connection and are not saved, stored, shared or maintained following the end of a session.

 

Going Deeper

I can’t do justice to the full breadth of Clerk functionality in a blog post. There are eight additional tabs which offer more detailed suggestions on how a brief can be improved. Those tabs are:  Briefs, arguments, cases, outcomes, supports, quotations, similar and judge. Each of these tabs provide suggested action items, insights in the form of an analytic chart and a deep dive into tools and data which will help execute on the “action items” in order to strengthen the brief.

• Action items (the what) Action items are the highest priority tasks that Clerk suggests performing.
• Insights (the why) Insights provide data and graphs that communicated the context behind Clerk’s analysis and Action items.
• Deep Dive (the how): Deep Dove [provides tools and data to execute on the Action Items, as well investigate further ways to strengthen or attach the brief.

  

 

The arguments tab evaluates the arguments presented in the brief and suggest other arguments for consideration.

The cases tab assist with understanding the side ability and presidential value of the case is relied upon in the brief.

The outcomes tab identifies the outcomes of cases cited within the brief and assist in achieving a good balance.

The supports tab assists with finding the best supporting cases for the legal principles in the brief.

The quotations tab checks the accuracy of quotations to California cases and statute cited in the brief.

The similar tab provides insight into appeals of decisions involving similar cases including those with the same course of action and posture as the brief.

The judges tab provides context about the judge the brief is filed with and the appeals from their decisions\

 

 

 

 

 

 

The WOW Factor There is definitely a wow factor to this product. Since I do not write briefs, I can not at this point provide a first hand assessment  on whether I would agree with most or all of the recommendations offered to improve a brief. Clerk is now being trialed by a number of law firms, and seasoned litigators will  be “kicking the tires” and “checking under the hood” and the ultimate judgement will be whether the product gets traction in the marketplace.

Clerk leaves the “Robot Lawyer” Products in the Dust. Clerk’s approach to analysis and recommendations is far beyond any other product I have seen which offers to streamline the litigation drafting process. While Gurari has avoided the brain numbing hyperbole of AI and robot lawyers in discussing Clerk, it is clear to me that Clerk delivers more practical insight and workflow efficiency than any of the wannabe – robot lawyer products that have been showered with excessive and uncritical reviews based on what they have promised rather than what they can deliver.

Clerk’s biggest drawback is that it is exclusively built for California state law. There are no immediate plans to extend Clerk to federal practice or to other states. Nonetheless, I am impressed with the Clerk framework and thorough approach to analysis which uses  human and machine intelligence as well as  analytics to help lawyers improve the quality of their work.

It is time for lawyers to move from making decisions based on “anec-data” to making decisions using contextually based analytics. Judicata’s Clerk takes a bold step forward and sets a high bar for other legal players who plan to develop drafting products for litigators.

A Clerk demo is available at this link.