On May 11, 2017, the French Supreme Court (Cour de cassation) recognized the importance of online services and platforms for benchmarking lawyers and law firms, in particular through rankings and ratings, for the protection of consumers of legal services.

However, the Court also affirmed that such services must ensure a certain level of quality. The lack of reliable information on the quality of legal services provided by lawyers in courtrooms is a worrying and widespread phenomenon in all EU jurisdictions, but also in the USA and Canada. This project aims to fill this gap by combining legal expertise and data science research.

The aim is to develop a meaningful and reliable tool for measuring legal performance in courtrooms that can help improve access to justice and the quality of legal services, while helping law firms to evaluate the performance of lawyers and the quality of jurisdictions.

This research project is based on the observation that the expansion and globalization of legal services contrasts sharply with the lack of sophistication of its performance measurement tools and the high level of information asymmetry existing between providers and consumers of these services. Existing performance measures - which include several types of perception and expert-based ratings, indicators and rankings - are generally not appropriate for evaluating legal services. Setting up a collaborative project between lawyers and data specialists to develop reliable and more objective measures would be a quantum leap in this field. In terms of results, the project will provide original data and a proof-of-concept for evaluating legal services in courtrooms, which will be tested and disseminated among market players.

The main objective of this project is to develop an automated system for mining case law in France, Belgium and Canada, with the aim of assessing the quality and performance of legal services in courtrooms, and in particular of lawyers and law firms. The project will seek to create metrics based primarily on the analysis of court decisions and, where appropriate, other data extracted from social networks (such as twitter, linked-in and blogs) in the field of administrative and commercial law.

In particular, this project will aim to:

• Measure the success rate of lawyers in relation to the field and difficulty of the issue dealt with;
• Assess their preference or aversion for transactional or alternative dispute resolution methods;
• If possible, identify the average damages obtained compared to the damages sought;
• Measure their success rate in each jurisdiction and in relation to specific judges.

Contacts : David Restrepo-Amariles | Michalis Vazirgiannis