Extract from Stephen Embry’s article “AI And The End Of The Law Firm: We May Wind Up Being Wrong?”
One thing I learned as a trial lawyer, sometimes the hard way, is that trusting your gut instinct is not the same as relying on data. That’s why in later years I became such an advocate of data-based litigation analytics.
Data has the unpleasant way of separating what we think is going on from what is really happening. And these days, that can lead us to overestimate our gut and underestimate the resilience of lawyers and law firms.
I once had a complex multi-party construction defect case. I naively believed my client was impressive and credible. I thought a jury would love this guy. I thought I knew what a jury would think. But when I did the jury research (this was before data analytics became the norm), I discovered the mock jurors immediately discredited him because of the business that he was in. And what they assumed about the people in that business. That changed everything about my strategy, to say the least.
