Legal Analytics

Legal Analytics is a discipline that applies the methods of data analysis, statistics and artificial intelligence to legal information in order to surface actionable trends. In practice, it means turning millions of court decisions into usable metrics: success rates by court, average compensation amounts, case duration, and the most effective arguments before a given court.

These tools allow lawyers to ground their litigation strategy in objective data rather than instinct alone. An employment lawyer can analyse the patterns of a specific labour tribunal, while a personal-injury specialist can accurately estimate the likely compensation ranges. France's legal open data, with the gradual release of all court decisions, feeds these tools directly.

A strict legal framework governs the practice, however: Article 33 of French Law 2018-2022 prohibits the profiling of judges, that is, the use of data to assess, analyse or predict an individual judge's behaviour. Legal Analytics must therefore operate at an aggregated statistical level, without identifying individual judges. This limit sets the French model apart from the more permissive Anglo-American approach.