LawProspector, founded in early 2008 by a group of attorneys working in the litigation support field, has gathered data on the largest active pieces of litigation in the US federal courts. This data “is loosely defined by the intersection of the world’s top 200 law firms, top 100,000 law firm contacts, top 3,000 corporations and 35,000 active federal cases in the most important civil practice areas.”
LawProspector’s founder, Kenneth J. Lopez, J.D, sent an example report. It shows in a bar graph 53 law firms and how many cases they are handling for in total for Microsoft, Pfizer or Bayer. The detailed table below has almost 20 fields of information for each case.
The data available would appear to help general counsel. For example, they could run conflicts checks on the law firms they retain or are thinking of retaining. They can find firms who would be solid invitees for an RFP process. They might use the LawProspector data to figure out benchmarks, such as cases per lawyer. I hope to prospect for some of these applications in later posts.