Law Department Management Blog
Most of the lawsuits defended by law departments have recognizable patterns and risk liabilities in the $5,000 to $100,000 range. They don’t warrant the fever-pitch attention of major litigation (See my post of Feb. 20, 2006 on the unusual characteristics of major litigation and Nov. 15, 2005 on Altria’s definition of “major litigation.”) but nevertheless these plain-potato cases can in the aggregate cost millions of dollars.
An article, Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2006 at 57, interviews Blane Erwin, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Bridgeway Software. Erwin describes Predix as litigation risk analysis software that “combines the primary pieces of a litigation tool at the high end with the experience of TMG Templates” so that in-house litigators can work with outside counsel and apply risk analysis techniques.
Supplemented by data from a matter management system and some estimates from lawyers, Erwin says the software can calculate probabilities, display decisions visually, keep an audit trail of risk assessments, and compute the likelihood of outcomes with more gradation than best and worst case (See my post of May 15, 2005 on Monte Carlo simulations.).