“Good lawyers know the law;
great lawyers know the judge.”
So sayeth Toby Unwin, co-founder of Premonition, which bills itself as the world’s largest litigation database. Unwin recently trotted out the courthouse cliché for an audience of more than 80 insurance company CEOs at a gathering of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America. His point was that big data could have – should have – a big impact on how insurers choose their counsel. He pointed to Premonition research showing that the track record of a specific litigator before a specific judge has a 30.7% impact on the outcome of future cases with the same lawyer-judge pairing. That edge turns a 50-50 crapshoot into a decided 80-20 advantage when choosing counsel. The current selection methods used by insurer GCs – reputation, rates, brand – produce 18% poorer results than random selection, Unwin said. Judging from the results of a post-seminar poll, he got the insurers’ attention.
Notch one win for Unwin.
Published January 11, 2019.
