Eagan, Minn. – Two individuals and two corporations from around the globe took the top spots this year for the 2015 Legal Tech Open Innovation Challenge sponsored by Thomson Reuters and CodeX.  Praescient Analytics received the first prize award of $20,000 for their creation of an application to help legal practitioners predict likely outcomes for motions to dismiss.

The Legal Tech Open Innovation Challenge saw legal professionals, technologists, data scientists and entrepreneurs from around the globe compete to create unique technology applications that provide high-value analytics to legal practitioners. Participants were given access to editorially-enhanced federal court dockets content, outside data, and the Thomson Reuters open-source company-identification system, PermID, to develop the new applications.  

Praescient Analytics of Alexandria, Virginia, won first place for their creation of iHammurabi. It leverages docket data to create a model predicting the likelihood for success of motions to dismiss before a specific judge in federal civil court based on key factors about the case.  “The opportunity to work with five years of court data was invaluable,” said Adam Reese of Praescient Analytics. “We were able to create a more accurate model that gives users a better understanding of a particular legal situation and likely outcomes.”

“We congratulate Praescient and all of this year’s Challenge participants,” said Carlos Gamez, senior director of Innovation for the legal business of Thomson Reuters. “Our customers are increasingly looking to the next generation of technology solutions to build and advance a better functioning legal system. Our partnership with CodeX allows us to combine our proprietary content and domain expertise with a broad range of leading technologists to further fuel innovation and advance the practice of law.”

“This year’s Challenge exceeded our expectations,” said Dr. Roland Vogl, executive director, CodeX. “More than 450 online project rooms were opened around the world, resulting in many unique entries being submitted. We look forward to working with Thomson Reuters to continue to explore ways to stimulate and uncover new innovations, wherever in the world they may emerge.”

Alexander Buese of Germany earned the second place spot and $15,000 by creating a tool that enables users to uncover trends and patterns among a variety of entities involved in litigation matters. Tied for third place, and awarded $10,000 each, were EPAM Systems Inc., an international software engineering company, and Muthukumarasamy Karthikeyan, a scientist in Puna Area, India. EPAM’s entry took the provided data to build a prediction model to forecast docket outcomes, and built a mechanism using contextual search to find similar dockets. Muthukumarasamy Karthikeyan’s program was configured to read about 100,000 records at once from a single file for greater efficiency.

The winners received their awards at a ceremony at Stanford Law School, where they also were invited to present their winning entries to fellow programmers, data scientists and  entrepreneurs, as well as legal professionals, academics and other interested parties.

A video discussing the 2015 Legal Tech Open Innovation Challenge, including the two top place finishers, can be found here: https://youtu.be/w6Fc1tW394A

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the Toronto and New York Stock Exchanges. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

CodeX

At CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, researchers and entrepreneurs design technologies for a better legal system. CodeX’s mission is to develop technologies that empower all parties in our legal system: lawyers, judges, policymakers and the public at large. CodeX emphasizes the research and development of computational law, the branch of legal informatics concerned with the automation and mechanization of legal analysis.