Glossary

Litigation analytics

Using data on past case outcomes, judges, and courts to inform legal strategy, such as predicting how a case might proceed.

Litigation analytics applies quantitative analysis to court records, dockets, and case filings — for example, how a particular judge tends to rule on a type of motion, typical time-to-resolution for a case type, or the track record of opposing counsel.

It relies on structured or extracted data from court filings, often using named-entity recognition and text analytics to pull structured facts — parties, judge, motion type, outcome — out of unstructured legal text at scale, then applies descriptive statistics or predictive analytics to surface patterns across many cases.

It helps law firms and in-house counsel set realistic expectations with clients, decide where to litigate, choose counsel, and estimate case duration and cost. It differs from e-discovery, which is about finding and reviewing evidence within a specific case, and from contract analytics, which examines existing agreements rather than litigation history. A common pitfall: outcomes are strongly shaped by case-specific facts that aggregate statistics can't capture, so litigation analytics informs strategy and probability, not a guaranteed prediction of how a specific case will be decided.

Last reviewed September 22, 2026

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Related terms

E-discovery (electronic discovery) Identifying, collecting, and reviewing electronically stored information as evidence in litigation or investigations. Contract analytics Using software to extract, review, and analyze clauses, terms, and obligations across many contracts at scale. Predictive analytics Analytics that uses historical data and statistical models to estimate what is likely to happen next. Named Entity Recognition (NER) An NLP technique that locates and classifies names of people, organizations, places, and other entities within text. Text analytics The techniques used to extract structured information and insight from unstructured text, from keyword counts to deep NLP.

Related tools

Lex Machina Federal litigation analytics platform mining court dockets to reveal how specific judges, courts, attorneys and law firms handle cases. LexisNexis Context Litigation analytics within LexisNexis's Lexis+ platform profiling judges, expert witnesses, courts and opposing counsel from case language and rulings. Westlaw Precision Thomson Reuters' AI-assisted legal research platform, layering litigation analytics on judges, courts and attorneys onto Westlaw's case law database.

Related guides

How to choose a legal analytics tool Legal analytics splits by court coverage and by whether it's standalone or layered inside a research subscription — match both to your matters.