A recent article by Scott Berinato in the Harvard Business Review on « visualizations that really work » explains how visualizations allow us to use data to make decisions. Too much data makes it impossible to determine what is relevant. When designing data visualizations, Berinato suggests that you first ask yourself two questions: First, are you visualizing qualitative (ideas) or quantitative (statistical) information? Second, what are you trying to do with visualization: communicate information or use it to understand something? When you combine the answers to these questions, you get four types of visual communication, which Berinato describes as follows: You can take the client`s negotiation team to a conference call and review the data you`ve gathered. You can explain the raw data and your analysis. You can load them with bullet points and statistics, and hope your logical analysis makes them feel good about giving something they hoped to avoid. For librarians, there are two main reasons for data visualization. The first is to convey information about library management, mainly information about budget and expenses (« daily visualizations »), and the second is to convey legal information (« idea illustration »). Visualizations are developed by experienced transactional lawyers who understand what questions clients are asking and how to bring the answers to life in a compelling way. They can help you identify, review, analyze, compare, and visualize overall trades and market trends with just a few clicks instead of spending hours researching. Compared to the relatively primitive tools that still dominate the field today, Lewis and Reed see Ravel as a promising resource for young lawyers and law students. « It`s about helping them do research with more confidence, » Lewis says. « It`s about making sure they understand the story in the right way. » And, of course, to make all this research a little less tedious. The lawyers working for Johnson`s campaign came to New Orleans and reviewed every decision they could make to determine which 5th District judge would hate their case the most.
The researchers found a case almost identical to Johnson`s situation, whose judge would surely rule against Johnson. Just to be sure, Johnson`s lawyers deliberately made the worst legal arguments they could imagine. Despite the fact that legal practice has changed significantly over the past 20 years, the main legal research tools have remained largely the same. Although Westlaw and Lexis Nexis, the two major players in legal research, have responded with some innovations in recent years, they have preferred to add content, mainly secondary source content, to their offerings. Ravel also has some smart details to handle cases once you find them. A clear user interface makes it easy to hover over documents, for example with built-in tools for highlighting and commenting on text. Early adopters reported that Ravel reduced their overall search time by up to two-thirds on some occasions. Ravel began as the duo`s project for LaunchPad, an extremely popular course at the venerable Stanford School of Design.
The site, which has since received more than $9 million in venture capital funding, brings a number of powerful tools to the research process. Search results are rendered as an interactive visualization instead of a block of text. The cases are shaped like bubbles, sorted by date. Landmark Falls are beautiful and large; Small cases are smaller. Lines connect the circles and show you how the cases are connected. You can filter these visual results in several ways, such as separating the decisions of the district courts, those of the district courts, and those rendered by the Supreme Court itself. « By mapping Shepard`s cases, citations and treatments deemed important, Ravel View eliminates countless hours spent on legal research and allows users to quickly and confidently find the most relevant cases that support their legal reasoning or strategy, » said Daniel Lewis, CEO of Ravel Law, a LexisNexis company. « Understanding the law and precedents is the basis of strategy in any legal matter. By integrating Lexis Advance with analytics and visualization technologies such as Ravel View, LexisNexis increases the efficiency and productivity of today`s data-driven lawyers.
Research is one of those centuries-old traditions in the legal profession. Opportune, because it takes a lot of time. Honored to the extent that the youngest employee should feel « honored » to have been in charge of the research. Data visualization can be very useful for visualizing library outputs, for example, David Whelan created a graph that shows the ever-increasing cost of loose sheets: twitter.com/davidpwhelan/status/461511623350304768. Other places where data visualization can be useful include illustrating database usage statistics (such as which databases are used by whom) and cost recovery. Data visualization is a way to make small or large amounts of information easier to understand. This is useful for organizing your thoughts and data (or documents). It allows you to create powerful and effective visuals for yourself, your clients or your judges. Data visualization can be useful for almost any lawyer, regardless of the size of their case, the size of their law firm, and the number of documents involved in a particular case. Tech-savvy lawyers use data visualization to streamline their own research and understanding of data. With a tool like What`s Market Analytics, you can effectively set up your safeguards and engage your customers. Ultimately, this will give you clearer bargaining power and an easier path to a good deal.
See for yourself what difference this can make in your practice. Solving these « grey areas » usually involves gathering a lot of information – synthesizing the law by combining parts of many cases to predict or convince the court. However, the traditional way of researching case law – reviewing a list of returned cases based on your application – does little to help you clean up the mess. Westlaw and Nexis, Lewis points out, have long governed solely on the basis of access. They were the guardians of all legal history, and a subscription was a mandatory expense for any law firm or law school. In recent years, however, much more of this information has become freely accessible. And with that, new tools became possible. As its creators see, Ravel`s visual search offers countless improvements over the old columns of text results. This allows you to better see how cases have evolved over time, and you may be able to see outliers that might be useful in creating an argument – the cases languishing at the end of a more traditional search.