Big data, big trademark questions
Managing IP is part of the Delinian Group, Delinian Limited, 4 Bouverie Street, London, EC4Y 8AX, Registered in England & Wales, Company number 00954730
Copyright © Delinian Limited and its affiliated companies 2024

Accessibility | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Modern Slavery Statement

Big data, big trademark questions

In an INTA Annual Meeting session yesterday, panelists demonstrated how trademark practitioners—particularly litigators—can use big data and analytics tools to grow their practices, provide fact-based predictions to clients and streamline the legal research process.

Daniel Lewis of Ravel Law, Ian C. Ballon of Greenberg Traurig, Darren Schleicher of Lex Machina and Alex Butler of Bloomberg BNA contributed the perspectives of both data analysts and litigators.

Massive databases such as PACER and LexisNexis catalogue comprehensive records and statistics of cases, but this volume of information can be unwieldly, requiring practitioners and their teams to spend many hours combing through records to manually find and analyze relevant data. However, harnessing this information through analytics tools can be useful at every stage of a case.

As attorneys and law firm business developers formulate strategies to grow their businesses, data can provide insights into “who are these companies using, who has a good track record, then drill down into the actual cases and dockets that are interesting to see changes trends over time,” said Butler. In-house counsel, he said, can also use this data to guide their choice of outside counsel, based on the past performances of firms handling matters similar to what they expect to encounter.

Data allows attorneys to demonstrate their expertise on various judges and venues, with specific regard to the client’s industry and the nature of the case at hand. Instead of providing anecdotal descriptions about the speed of a venue, or their personal impression of a judge, data gives attorneys an opportunity to prove that they know what they are talking about. Lex Machina, a legal analytics company owned by LexisNexis, provides features such as a timeline predictor, which, depending on the stipulations a user enters, will return visualizations for the average duration of a case of the specified nature.

Even a specific judge’s decisions have become far more predictable through data analytics. Lewis said that the tool analyzes patterns of language used by judges, so that litigators can see “what’s resonated with the judge before, and how can you tailor your argument to grab them.”

This and other insights accessible through analytics could theoretically be mined manually, but that process is made far more efficient through technological tools. These facts still require interpretation, but analytics tools are “exploratory”: they should not be seen as “replacing human reasoning, but as supplementing it with data,” said Lewis. 

more from across site and ros bottom lb

More from across our site

As Australia’s Qantm IP leans towards being acquired by a private equity company, sources discuss what it could mean for IP firms
Law firms that are conscious of their role in society are more likely to win work, according to a survey of over 23,000 in-house professionals
Pham Nghiem Xuan Bac, managing partner of Vision & Associates, discusses opportunities created by the US-China rift as well as profitability issues facing IP practices
Douglas Leite and two of his colleagues were intrigued by Bhering Advogados’s mission to grow its patent litigation practice
Each week Managing IP speaks to a different IP practitioner about their life and career
Counsel explain how pricing flexibility, patent agents and being business partners can help them maintain profitable patent prosecution practices
We provide a rundown of Managing IP’s news and analysis from the week, and review what’s been happening elsewhere in IP
Speakers at an INTA event weighed in on why firms should create AI use policies and how they stay on top of the latest developments
The England and Wales Court of Appeal backed Lidl in its trademark dispute with Tesco, but we should pay more attention to how we rule on first-instance decisions
Richard Kempner, partner at Haseltine Lake Kempner, discusses the ‘remarkable’ comments from judges, despite the court finding against his client Tesco on the bulk of issues
Gift this article