Litigation Analytics: Extracting and querying motions and orders from US federal courts

Legal litigation planning can benefit from statistics collected from past decisions made by judges. Information on the typical duration for a submitted motion, for example, can give valuable clues for developing a successful strategy. Such information is encoded in semi-structured documents called dockets. In order to extract and aggregate this information, we deployed various information extraction and machine learning techniques. The aggregated data can be queried in real time within theWestlaw Edge search engine. In addition to a keyword search for judges, lawyers, law firms, parties and courts, we also implemented a question answering interface that offers targeted questions in order to get to the respective answers quicker.