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Nevada’s libertarian approach to the law has been one of its signature characteristics since the 1940s, but as one of America’s fastest growing states (and one with relatively high divorce and crime rates), its courtrooms see their fair share of traffic. The state’s busiest firms each took on hundreds, often thousands, of cases in 2015-2016. Thanks to a legal survey produced by Miami-based software company Premonition Analytics, there is finally hard data available to rank Nevada’s practices by caseload.

Nevada’s loose laws regarding marriage, liquor, gambling and prostitution tend to draw the most attention from outsiders, and its busiest firm, the Henderson-based Dempsey, Roberts & Smith, appropriately covers a broad practice area, from family law to personal injury. Elsewhere in the top ten though, many major firms focus on corporate litigation. The rapid growth of the Las Vegas metropolitan area makes real estate litigation a fertile sector for firms like Levinson Arshonsky & Kurtz. Meanwhile, outside of the heavily urbanized Clark County, much of Nevada remains sparsely-populated desert, rich in natural resources. Kaempfer Crowell is among the state’s most active firms in areas of land-use, zoning, water and utilities.

Premonition claims this general survey is just the tip of the iceberg of data it is preparing to make available to its clients. The company’s proprietary artificial intelligence tool is able to parse a vast database of court data to produce detailed statistics on individual firms and attorneys. These statistics include, at a macro level, data on average case duration and win rates, but they can also zoom in to evaluate a firm’s performance before a given judge or within a specific area of practice. The implications are both obvious and profoundly disruptive: imagine being in a fantasy football league, and being the only one with access to every player’s career statistics. Do you think your odds would improve?

If Premonition’s AI is as sophisticated as the company claims, its clients intending to go to court in Nevada will enter the process of selecting their representation with more information at their fingertips than ever before in the history of American law.

“This is going to change everything,” says Premonition Business Development Director Nathan Huber. “It’s going to turn the industry on its head”.

Source: Investor Place