Premonition, helps organizations with lots of litigation find the best lawyers for specific cases. For Premonition CEO Toby Unwin, designing the Premonition big data system was very personal. “I had to deal with large amounts of litigation and realized I had no way to find out who the best attorneys were and how we would be able to measure how good they were,” says Unwin. To know how often a lawyer wins is an obvious question, but one that proved incredibly difficult to answer. Jaws dropped when we showed what we could find from existing court data.”

However, big data analytics applications like Unwin’s Premonition can be an acquired taste for lawyers. “While insurance companies love us — they’re all about big data, analytics and performance measurement — lawyers? Not so much. Initially, it was like asking cows what they thought about McDonalds,” says Unwin. “Slowly, now that they realize they can use this data to win account pitches and land new clients, they’re starting to come around. When it becomes common knowledge that firm brand is not a good measure of litigator quality, the market will shift emphasis onto picking lawyers individually by real world, data-based metrics.”