Last September, Geek #2, sent me a short email asking if I knew anything about the product called Justly. His short description of how Justly had a case categorization feature, and was pulling data from the Federal Courts (not that big a deal), and thousands of State Courts (huge deal), made my ears perk up and I made an effort to find out more about the product. I went to the website and poked around a little and finally reached out to Laurent Wiesel at Justly to learn more. In the five months since initially talking with Laurent, they have given me a couple of demos, and quite frankly, it was the coolest product I saw at LegalWeek last week. I’ve seen more and more potential with Justly and have finally convinced the Justly team to let me blog about it.
So what’s the big deal behind Justly? I don’t want to bury the lead here, so let me first start off by listing what I think is the most important feature behind Justly. The large amounts of data. Specifically, the large amount of State Court data. As of the writing of this article, here are the numbers:
- Over 15 million cases
- 12.5 million State Court cases
- 2.6 million Federal cases
- 2,247 U.S. Courts
Those are numbers that other sources just don’t have. Of course, data is simply that. How does Justly put it to work? Let me give a bit of background.
Justly was founded by former BigLaw attorney Laurent Wiesel (CEO) back in 2015 and he has teamed up with Sanjay Singh (technology), and Matteo Balzarini (Marketing), and they have focused on developing Justly as a data-driven platform for corporate legal departments. In a nutshell, they give the corporate legal departments a way to create early case assessments on cases in which the corporation is involved. With that information in hand, the corporate legal departments can take the case number of their case and Justly returns a series of elements that are useful in order to take action. The three main features returning actionable insights are Matter Classification, Case Precedents and Timeline Analytics.
Classification helps you understand all the public data in better way that helps you find the elements that define your case. Through that, it connects to Precedents and those are the cases that are comparable based on the classification. You can then see what happened in the past based on the actual metrics of similar cases. This leads us to the third feature of Timeline Analytics which assists you in making informed decisions based on the metrics. These features come together as a standardized case assessment that predicts phases, major events (tasks/deliverables) and the cycle times for any U.S. litigation matter. Having this level of analysis allows those managing the matters (whether that is in-house counsel or litigation partner in a law firm) to structure Alternative Fee Arrangement (AFA) and matter-level budgets, review precedents with your internal or e-billing system, and scope your matter management processes through the use of the scoping template.
[See the embedded video below for a quick tour of performing a case assessment on a specific court case.]
Beyond the value that is found in the results that Justly brings to case management, they are undertaking a process to bring more court information into play in a useful way. Many products have great features, but not enough, or not the right kind of data behind it. Justly brings both to the table. With the demands on in-house legal departments to better manage and pay for legal services, Justly can serve as a method of leveraging court and internal data to better predict what is the proper way to manage and price the case. For law firms, Justly allows them to better scope and predict the details of a matter, and how to better staff and price the matter for the client.
From what I’ve seen from Justly, they are positioning themselves to support the legal industry that is demanding better way’s of managing cases and filling in the blanks with solid data and analytics.
Justly – Standardize Legal Business Operations from Justly on Vimeo.