I have advocated formal risk analysis and decision trees to assess and manage litigation risk. Learning decision trees is, however, not that easy. A new automated approach overcomes this barrier for some cases.
Predix, from case management software provider Bridgeway, “is a sophisticated decision analysis system that lawyers can use to evaluate their inventory of commodity litigation – small to medium size cases of a repetitive nature” according to the Predix press release. An article in the March issue of Metropolitan Corporate Counsel explains
“Predix software is simple in terms of the information needed to be loaded into the tool. The user plugs in the claims, any hot button issues, the track record of the other side against the company in similar cases, and the defenses that the company is thinking of raising… This gives users the opportunity to project probabilities, which can be modified, tweaked and aggregated based on any of a variety of scenarios…. The tool helps speed decision making because it provides a visual depiction of a decision tree without the user having to know anything about the tree’s underlying sophisticated structure.”
For background on decision trees, see an article I co-wrote with David Post, which also explains an earlier approach to automating decision trees that Wilmer Cutler co-developed with Litigation Risk Analysis, Inc.
To learn more about using decision trees, you can attend seminars by Litigation Risk Management Institute, TreeAge software, or Litigation Risk Analysis, Inc.