By Jason Wilson
Someone wrote a post last week making me look at meetandconfer.com, which is another site dedicated to programmatic guidance for a niche area of Federal practice. I don’t have an opinion about the service, but it made me think about the rapid growth of survey-style programs designed to help lawyers along a particular process, Lexis’ Practice Advisor being one of the latest. <rant>And expect to see many more as lawyers try to monetize their “expertise” by shoving it all into decision matrix and selling it to you. Honestly, the practice is going to become this odd amalgam of programs with a little bit of thinking and creativity in the workflow gaps that abhor reduction. </rant>
But I have to say that I’m a bit surprised that no one, to my knowledge, has a guidance system for insurance coverage opinions. If you’ve ever had to do one, you know what a pain in the ass they can be, and Miller’s can only get you so far.
Anyway, if you know someone who is working in this space, drop me a line. I’d love to hear about the product.
UPDATE: Toby Brown over at Three Geeks was kind enough to point me to Neota Logic, which doesn’t have a guidance system specifically for coverage opinions, but there’s no reason to think that system couldn’t do it. Jordan Furlong highlighted Neota last year in “Here come the robo-lawyers”:
Neota Logic is among the first of what looks to be the future of automated systems in the law: an “expert application.” Neota is essentially an applied knowledge management system: it automates lawyers’ knowledge and expertise to create step-by-step processes for solving low- and medium-grade regulatory, compliance and advisory problems. [¶] Neota users log in to the system and enter the relevant data on the specific regulatory or compliance issue facing them; the system prompts them to answer a sequence of questions based on the data it’s receiving. Based on those responses and drawing from a deep collection of expert knowledge acquired from both lawyers and databases, Neota chooses the correct paths through the thicket of possible choices and arrives at the same result that an expert lawyer would have reached.
Sounds interesting.
[Image (CC) by alancleaver_2000]
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m with you 100%. Well, 99%: even paragraph level citation is still arbitrary and a cop-out. The future is in precise phrase-level citation. You want to cite this comment from the word “still” to the (first) word “comment”? Use a hash that uniquely identifies that phrase, is easy to interpret (both by computer and human), and can be translated into the anachronistic page number citation when needed.
The technology is here; we can start with Texas or one of the more enlightened states.
Texas cases? Let\’s do it.
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