Mr Karageorge, Jurimetrics’ managing director, told Lawyers Weekly the platform draws data from two main sources. The first is legal judgments from the major state Supreme Courts, the Federal Court and the High Court, as well as sources such as the Fair Work Commission, Native Title Tribunal and Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

The second source of data is regulators such as the ACCC, WorkSafe and the Environmental Protection Agency.

This data includes details of judgments, prosecutions, fines, licences, planning approvals and other legal matters. Jurimetrics analyses the raw data to select key terms and form connections, presenting users with insights that can have several applications, according to Mr Karageorge.

“The big one at the moment is understanding law firms and barristers, essentially getting a profile on their activity,” he said.

“So you go into our platform and you type in the name of a law firm or a barrister, and what you’ll get access to is the clients they’ve had, the matters they’ve been involved in, whether or not they’ve been involved with particular courts, particular judges [and] legislation down to the actual section itself.

“You are also able to obtain their outcomes, and you’ll also get some information as well on the number of cases that they handle every year.

“From a business development point of view, it’s also really useful. Being able to look at what the competition is doing is always really useful, it’s actually a good barometer of legal health in the industry.”

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The software can also be used for due diligence, providing insights into companies’ interactions with courts and regulators. Mr Karageorge said by performing this tedious task, typically assigned to paralegals or junior lawyers, Jurimetrics will reduce the cost of due diligence and enable lawyers to focus on providing strategic advice.

“What’s interesting about analytics is it does allow that more creative analysis,” he said.

“It sort of helps move lawyers from the transactional nature of doing checks on annual reports to being a more trusted adviser. If you’re the font of information, you have the capacity to help clients through particular strategic processes rather than just being a functionary.”

Mr Karageorge added that his team has been careful to respect privacy concerns.

“We’ve put in place a really rigorous privacy policy and we made sure that the courts were aware of what we were doing, and I think that’s really important going forward because the scraping of data, especially in court contexts, there’s a certain privacy element to it,” he said.

“There is a dangerous element there to have things disclosed that otherwise shouldn’t be: issues with redacted judgments and so forth, disclosure of names or addresses.”

For example, the creators of Jurimetrics have removed names from the system, partly to protect people’s privacy and partly because names are not necessarily unique identifiers.

“There might come a time when we’re a little bit more comfortable looking at [publishing names] or ways of doing that, and particularly in the context of company directors,” Mr Karageorge said.

“But I think for now we want to play it safe. We want to really gain the trust of the legal community before we start going into more interesting or more difficult territories.”

There are several other players in the emerging Australian legal analytics market, including LexisNexis and Premonition.