alt.legal: The Stickiness Of Biglaw Prestige, And The Disruptive Potential Of Technology (Part II)

What if a machine could actually tell us which firms produce the best legal work product?

Joe Borstein

Last month, we explored why Cravath is (and remains) Cravath — i.e., the best of the best.  Today, we explore how a company which claims to have “mapped the legal genome” could one day help Biglaw upstarts prove that they deserve to shop for white shoes at Cravath’s bespoke cobbler.

First, a quick reminder of Part I:  Summarizing the findings of Tomorrowland (the excellent book by legal economist Bruce MacEwen), we saw that in Biglaw, rankings of legal prestige remains rock solid (low volatility for those of you who watch the market), while the business world outside of law is in a state of unprecedented flux.

Bruce proposed the following fundamental paradox about the creation and maintenance of Biglaw prestige:

“The firms with the strongest brand names are those deemed to provide the highest quality – and the way you can be assured they’re of the exceptional quality is because they have strong brands.”

Put another way, “in the absence of facts, the best predictor of weather tomorrow is weather today.”  But what if there were “facts”?  What if a machine could actually tell us which firms produce the best legal work product? Would legal look more like retail, with a legal Amazon right around the corner?

For Part Two, I sat down with Columbia Law grad and former Google engineer, Itai Gurari. Itai is the founder of Judicata, and he believes his product can predict the weather tomorrow, based on facts today. Last year, rock-star legal tech columnist Bob Ambrogi cryptically described Judicata as:

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“a mystery. Its website teased visitors with the promise of a forthcoming legal research service that would be better than any other, and it had $8 million in financing from some big-name investors, including PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Box founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith.”

Well, today we sit down with Itai to unravel this mystery, solve The MacEwen Paradox and learn — which Biglaw firm is best!

Enjoy:

Joe Borstein: What I call Stickiness, you have compared to Newton’s first law of motion.  Can you walk our readers through that analogy?

Itai Gurari:  Newton’s first law of motion says that a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force.

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Prestige in the law has historically followed the same behavior. The firms that were most prestigious last year will be the most prestigious this year. That’s because we haven’t had access to objective measures of lawyer quality. We’ve been forced to rely on subjective measures like reputation, and simple proxies like revenue-per-partner, both of which are incredibly self-reinforcing. The most prestigious law firms attract the wealthiest clients. Those clients are willing to pay the highest hourly rates. Those higher rates burnish the law firm’s reputation and increase the law firm’s revenue. This makes them all the more prestigious.

It takes a really big external force for a firm to slip (which Skadden’s Ukraine-related work and the van der Zwaan guilty plea may prove to be).

JB: But do you really believe there is a truly objective measure of law firm quality?

IG: I don’t believe there is a single truly objective measure of law firm quality that supersedes all other measures.

I do, however, believe there are multiple objective measures of law firm quality, and that law firms can be accurately evaluated upon them.

JB: How have you and Judicata sought to capture that reality?

IG: We’ve focused on one particular measure of law firm quality and that is motion drafting.

Just as there are best practices for persuasive writing, and there are best practices for legal writing, there are also best practices for drafting motions. We are taught to write clearly and persuasively for a reason — because it helps us tell our client’s story in a convincing and compelling way.

This includes basics like not having typos, and citing and quoting cases correctly. It also includes more sophisticated techniques like relying on cases that go your way, relying on cases that are less likely to be distinguished, and having a good balance of arguments. Briefs that do these things tend to win more.

At Judicata, we built a detailed map of California law and software that can read briefs to recognize when they are not following these best practices. Many lawyers at prestigious law firms think they’re doing a great job, but they’re making mistakes left and right — mistakes that their clients would be shocked to find out about (especially when these motions cost tens of thousands of dollars to research and write).

We recently evaluated briefs filed by the 20 largest law firms in California and 45% of those firms had misspelled the name of the judge in a brief they filed.

JB: Wow, ouch!  So other than that shocking outcome, how did the rest of the results come out?  How well do they match the old predictors of prestige?

IG: Our ability to objectively evaluate the motion drafting of these law firms allowed us to rank their litigation practices. The results did include some surprises:

  1. Morgan, Lewis & Bockius
  2. DLA Piper
  3. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe
  4. Jones Day
  5. Lewis Brisbois
  6. Sidley Austin
  7. Morrison & Foerster
  8. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher
  9. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan
  10. Fenwick & West
  11. Paul Hastings
  12. Perkins Coie
  13. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
  14. Seyfarth Shaw
  15. Latham & Watkins
  16. Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman
  17. Littler Mendelson
  18. Cooley
  19. O’Melveny & Myers
  20. Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton

While all the firms are in the Am Law 100, it’s a largely different group than those at the top of the Vault prestige ranking, which skews heavily towards New York City law firms servicing Wall Street’s deal needs. But I have to admit that I was happy to see Jones Day landing quite high in our rankings, as I was previously an associate in their New York office and I still have good friends at the firm.

The thing about the ranking and our analysis is that there are consistent and significant differences between the law firms at the top and bottom of our ranking, which leads us to believe that the differences reflect firm-wide issues with training, technology utilization, and process. Much of the work falls on associates, and if they are not properly trained or given the right tools, then quality control problems crop up — just like at my local Five Guys restaurant that often overcooks and under-salts the french fries. Occasionally I have to ask for a new order of fries — which I get! — but a client can’t ask for a re-do if their lawyers underperformed and they lost their motion for summary judgment.

JB: So can new firms use this analysis to monitor their skill and improve their prestige in the long run?

IG: Yes. Clerk — our tool that performs this analysis — is being used by lawyers and courts and the reception has been excellent. It’s presently limited to litigation involving California state law, but it’s already having a big impact.

It’s also worth noting that the software is not just useful for evaluating your own briefs. Clerk is also great for identifying weaknesses and areas of attack in your opponent’s briefs. One of Clerk’s neater features is that it will identify when your opponent is modifying or misquoting the law, which happens a lot. For example, we recently came across a brief where the lawyers misrepresented the law by adding the word “reasonable” to a statement of a particular legal principle .

JB: Very interesting!  So, aside from Clerk, what makes Judicata special?  Where does it fit in the legal ecosystem, and how does it compare to the big guys (West and Lexis) and the other exciting upstarts (like Casetext)?

IG: We’re focused on building the most intelligent legal research and drafting platform for lawyers in California. That narrow jurisdictional focus has allowed us to produce smarter technology and more accurate data. Those are crucial to building an advanced tool like Clerk, which is unlike anything else on the market.

The result is that Judicata helps lawyers win. One of our first beta users worked at a non-profit and beat a major Am Law 100 law firm because of his access to Judicata. He and his opponents had one hour to research an issue and our user was able to find the only on point case in under 10 minutes on Judicata, while it took the other side the full hour. That gave him the time to craft the winning argument and beat the half dozen lawyers that were arrayed against him.

JB:  Thanks Itai, very interesting stuff.  Anything else you’d like to say to the budding legal entrepreneurs out there?

IG: Building a legal tech business is hard, but it’s a lot more fun than practicing law!


Joe Borstein Joseph Borstein

Joe Borstein, Esq. is  Chief Revenue Officer for NAM (National Arbitration and Mediation), a leading provider of arbitration and mediation services, with over 2,500 neutrals across the country.  At NAM, Joe is charged with developing, implementing and overseeing the strategic goals for the company.  He leads the company’s business development initiatives and related customer service operations that are designed to provide law firms and corporate clients with a fair, fast and reasonably priced alternative to the court system.  

He is a frequent speaker and writer on global trends in the legal industry and, specifically, how law firms are leveraging those trends to become more profitable. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and the delivery of legal services, or alternative dispute resolution, please reach out to Joe directly at jborstein@namadr.com.