Choosing counsel is one of the most important decisions a person can make in their legal case. People should have the benefit of seeing an attorney’s public court records before making that decision.
Washington, DC (PRWEB) November 14, 2016
A new startup, Justice Toolbox, Inc., today released its online search engine to help everyday people find lawyers (http://www.justicetoolbox.com). The search engine uses data mined from official state court records to compute and display how many cases a lawyer has won and lost and the lawyer’s approximate win rate. All of this is done on a per case type basis, so that, for example, consumers can see how often lawyers win in traffic cases separately from divorce cases. No other products on the market allow consumers to check how often lawyers actually win cases.
The search engine uses data from close to 5 million state court records, includes over 70,000 lawyers, and allows searching for 180 case types. It is free to use.
The core technology was developed in secrecy over the last year and involves a custom-designed artificial intelligence (AI) program that analyzes each court record, formally called a “docket,” that is the official record of events in a case. Dockets are commonly used by lawyers, though they are incomprehensible to everyday people due to legal jargon. Justice Toolbox’s AI reads and understand these dockets as a lawyer would, in order to determine the case outcome, case type, and the attorneys involved.
“Choosing counsel is one of the most important decisions a person can make in their legal case,” said Bryant Lee, Founder and CEO of Justice Toolbox, Inc. “People should have the benefit of seeing an attorney’s public court records before making that decision.”
The startup is the brain child of Lee, an attorney and Harvard Law School graduate, who previously worked at one of Washington, D.C.’s largest law firms, Covington & Burling LLP. He was inspired to create Justice Toolbox because attorneys at his firm would routinely send company-wide emails asking for suggestions on attorneys to use for everyday issues. He realized that even lawyers had no idea how to find other lawyers and that a technological solution was needed. As a lawyer, Lee would regularly read court dockets and believed that he could develop an AI program to do the same thing.
Justice Toolbox is based in Bethesda, Maryland and is initially launching with data from Maryland and District of Columbia courts. It plans to expand to more cities and states across the country by next year.