The Coalition of Technology Resources for Lawyers (CTRL), an open source community for legal practitioners, today released the results from its annual Advanced Analytics Research, revealing an uptick in analytics usage by in-house legal departments.

“We are excited to present our annual research demonstrating the use and proliferation of advanced analytics in the legal community,” said Philip Favro, director of legal education and resources at CTRL. “The CTRL survey demonstrates that today’s practitioners are more bullish than ever at putting these cutting-edge technologies to work.”

Highlights from the research include:

  • Analytics Will Be “Indispensable.” The overwhelming majority (99%) of respondents agree that data analytics will be absolutely necessary to the legal profession over the next 10 years;
  • e-Discovery Leads the Way. e-Discovery practitioners pointed to culling, early case assessment and fact finding as their 3 top analytics use cases;
  • More Money on Matter Management. Twice as many legal departments confirmed their intention of using analytics for matter management and 71% predict increased spending;
  • Dramatic Increase of Analytics Use in IG. The survey respondents confirmed using advanced analytics in defensible disposition (83%), policy compliance (83%), data migration (82%), and automated content categorization (72%) with the latter showing a 50% year-over-year increase;
  • Exponential Growth in Analytics for Contract Review. Five times as many legal departments say they will start using analytics for contract review in 2017, over last year.

“Marc Andreessen famously once quipped that ‘software is eating the world,’ and the same can be said today about the pervasiveness of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics in the legal world, said Dean Gonsowski, Executive Director of CTRL and VP Business Development at kCura. “It is great to see the breadth of analytics applications increasing dramatically year-over-year among in-house counsel looking to apply more process efficiencies and cost savings to their legal operations. We believe these trends will continue to transform the legal community and drive the next wave of increased efficiency and innovation.”

To learn more about CTRL’s Advanced Analytics Research, join the webinar “Analytics, Automation, AI: The Effect on Corporate Legal” that will be held on February 16, 2017, from 1:00 to 1:30 p.m. CST with panelists Barclay T. Blair of the Information Governance Initiative (IGI) and Dean Gonsowski of CTRL.

Methodology
The research was conducted using a gated survey that limited responses only to practitioners with visibility into their legal department’s use of analytics. One third of respondents were attorneys (most holding senior positions) and about two-thirds were from IT, analytics, information governance, and other professionals working in or supporting the legal department.

About CTRL

The Coalition of Technology Resources for Lawyers (www.CTRLinitiative.com) is an open source community for legal practitioners who are involved in e-discovery, investigations, and information governance. Sponsors of the initiative include the world’s leading law firms, enterprise software companies, and litigation support providers.