The Second Annual Workshop on Big Data Analytics in the Legal Industry

December 12, 2018 @ Seattle, WA, USA

Information management has become a significant business challenge, with the global volume of electronically stored information doubling roughly three times since 2010. Attorneys often are overwhelmed by big data challenges, such as the number of documents that must be reviewed and produced over the course of a legal matter or voluminous transactional records that must be analyzed. In large-scale litigation, legal teams may be required to produce millions of documents for opposing parties or regulators; these same teams typically must wade through documents to find supporting evidence for their own arguments, as well as sifting the voluminous material provided by the opposition. Advanced analytics technologies – text categorization, clustering, speech recognition, machine translation, sentiment analysis, information extraction, image recognition and others – are helping the legal industry address the massive data volumes and challenging data types by adding significant efficiencies and cost reductions to the legal document review process.

At the same time, big data analytics are reinventing the legal industry’s approach to data mining and analysis. Tremendous amounts of data are generated by the legal system, e.g. docket data of the 350,000 cases brought to court in the United States every year. These ever-growing massive data often contain the key legal insights required to win cases. Within case data, big data analytics can help law firms gain competitive advantages by providing insights and patterns extracted from big data based on past behaviors of judges, attorneys and other parties in similar cases. Potentially allowing for the development of more effective legal strategies that predict the outcome of a case, how long will it might last, and how much it might cost.

With both the challenges and opportunities brought by legal big data, we identified a gap between the legal industry and academics working with big data. Building on the success of last year’s workshop, we intend to use this year’s workshop to continue to bridge that gap, to further big data analytics research applied to legal data, and to provide an open and thoughtful dialogue about how these analytics assist legal practitioners. Additionally, this workshop is intended to promote the application of big data analytics in the legal industry and we are looking for interesting and novel examples. This workshop will accept broad applications of analytics applied to legal industry challenges or legal industry data. This is the second of a series of workshops we are hosting to advance the study of big data analytics in the legal industry.

Research Topics:
• Applications of big data analytics to ediscovery
• Applications of big data analytics to contract management
• Applications of big data analytics to litigation support
• Other big data applications applied to the legal domain
• Issues related to big data in legal domain, e.g. privacy and compliance

Important Dates:
• Oct 20, 2018: Due date for workshop papers submission
• Nov 5, 2018: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
• Nov 15, 2018: Camera-ready of accepted papers
• Dec 12, 2018: Workshop

Paper Submission Instructions:

Full papers — up to 10 pages IEEE 2-column format — should be submitted via the conference workshop online submission system https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2018/bigdata18/scripts/submit.php?subarea=S10 . We also encourage submission of short papers (up to 6 pages) reporting works in progress. Papers should be formatted to IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines (more instructions and templates can be downloaded from the conference website). The submission deadline is Oct. 20, 2018. All accepted papers will be included in the conference proceedings and published by the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Program co-chairs:
• Jianping Zhang – Ankura
• Robert Keeling – Sidley Austin
• Rishi Chhatwal – AT&T Services
• Peter Gronvall – Ankura
• Nathaniel Huber-Fliflet – Ankura

Program Committee Members:
• David Lewis – Brainspace
• Ali Hadjarian – Deloitte
• Vikram Kapoor – Ankura
• Huan Liu – Arizona State University
• Arthur Carvalho – Miami University
• Jiepu Jiang – Virginia Tech
• Haozhen Zhao – Ankura
• Han Qin – Ankura