Information management has become a significant business challenge, with the global volume of electronically stored information doubling roughly three times since 2010. Attorneys often are overwhelmed by big data challenges, such as the number of documents that must be reviewed and produced over the course of a legal matter or voluminous transactional records that must be analyzed. In large-scale litigation, legal teams may be required to produce millions of documents for opposing parties or regulators; these same teams typically must wade through documents to find supporting evidence for their own arguments, as well as sifting the voluminous material provided by the opposition. Big data analytics techniques — text categorization, clustering, speech recognition, machine translation, sentiment analysis, information extraction, and others — are helping the legal industry address the massive data volumes and challenging data types by adding significant efficiencies and cost reductions to the legal document review process.

Big data analytics can help law firms gain competitive advantages by providing insights and patterns extracted from big data based on past behaviors of judges and attorneys in similar cases. Analytics can also be used to predict the outcome of a case, how long it might last, and how much it might cost.

While these analytics can solve legal data challenges, there is a gap between the legal industry and academics working with big data. This workshop is designed to bridge that gap and further big data analytics research applied to legal data and to provide an open and thoughtful dialogue about how these analytics assist legal practitioners. Additionally, this workshop is intended to promote the application of big data analytics in the legal industry and we are looking for interesting and novel examples of this. This workshop will accept broad applications of analytics applied to legal industry challenges or legal industry data. This is the first of a series of workshops we plan to host to advance the study of big data analytics in the legal industry.