Loom Analytics Launches Today
[Necessary disclosure: My company Stem Legal has been working with Loom Analytics for several months now during their beta period. It’s a relationship I’m proud to showcase, but also one we are compensated for.]
Today is an exciting day for Loom Analytics. One of the country’s most interesting legal tech startups has officially closed its beta phase and has opened up registration to legal consumers. Less than 18 months after the Loom team first started working on the idea of a Canadian legal analytics tool, the company (whom you may recall from a Slaw Vendor Quiz earlier this year) is now open and offering a free 30-day trial to anyone interested in testing their wares.
What exactly does Loom do? It complements traditional legal research by mining, classifying and annotating legal data (currently caselaw from Canadian court websites or CanLII) to identify meaningful patterns and generate graphs that display those results in a meaningful way.
To give an example, you can run a search to find all decisions where a plaintiff brought a summary judgment motion in a property damage case and won. Identifying cases that meet those criteria would take days to do manually, but with Loom you can have the results in moments.
Examined another way, it’s like “Moneyball for lawyers” and can be used at the outset of any potential action to help lawyers map out case strategy. According to Loom, feedback has been fantastic, with several senior lawyers confirming that they have successfully won motions in court with the help of Loom’s data.
To show the many ways in which their tool can be used, Loom has shared a number of reports built upon its analytics output, including:
- outcomes for self-represented litigants,
- civil trials vs. criminal trials for sexual assault survivors,
- plaintiff trial outcomes in medical malpractice cases, and
- whether summary judgments have increased since they were endorsed by the SCC in 2014.
For me, Loom Analytics’ capability and potential are truly exciting! The company is also poised to keep growing as they inch towards national Canadian data coverage. Kudos to the whole Loom team for their remarkable accomplishment!
You imply that the data covers all Canadian jurisdictions when you say the service works off of legal data, to wit: “currently caselaw from Canadian court websites or CanLII”. This appears misleading for two reasons.
When I look at the Loom Analytics website, it seems that only Upper Canada lawyers will obtain any benefit from the service, at least right now; it also appears that this for-profit venture functions exclusively by Hoovering up the data I already paid for CanLII to provide as a public service: http://www.loomanalytics.com/our-data/
Have I got any of that wrong?
Only that I have implied national coverage. “Inching towards” was intended to mean they are moving toward that final goal, not that they have achieved it. Though with the volume of decisions, Upper Canada is by far the largest Canadian target. As I understand it, filling in other jurisdictions & court levels will come quite quickly by comparison.
Loom Analytics at least based on the example, is providing some predictive modeling for certain types of legal cases –meaning on legal matters have been filed in court.
There’s a lot of other work, that is risk management: to prevent cases from reaching litigation that in-house counsel handle plus government agencies which have mandated/legislated authority for administering and interpeting defined pieces of legislation.
Of value would be knowing trends in artificial intelligence to manage risk with either existing features in certain software. ie. construction claims which is an ongoing tactic by engineering firms. As we all know, there needs to be right information in any system to apply AI module/features.