Have you self-scouted?

As some of you know I was a high-school and semi-pro football coach for a decade or so. Most fans know that teams actively scout their upcoming opponents. Not only do we watch their games to understand who their best players are and what kind of offense and defense they run, but it goes a lot deeper than that - most teams actively chart out the other team’s personnel, formations, and playcalls so that you can more accurately predict that on 2nd and long they’re likely to throw the ball to #84 on a post route, or on 3rd and short they’re likely to blitz both A-gaps.

But what fans may not realize is that a lot of teams run this same analysis on themselves. The point of doing that is to figure out if you’re being too predictable. You may not realize that 83% of the time on 3rd and 1 you run I Right Zoom A2 Blast but your opponents probably do. And it can be helpful to recognize when you’re being predictable and to vary things up in an intelligent way.

(One exception - at one school I coached at our center and running back were both major college prospects and we didn’t much care about being predictable. Knowing what we were going to do and stopping it were entirely different things.)

So how does this apply to legal tech? One area where we’re seeing increased usage of AI and data science in law is in evaluating judges or opposing counsel to determine their tendencies. Does that judge favor plaintiffs in trademark cases? Does opposing counsel tend to accept lower-than-average cash settlements if payment terms are more favorable?

This can be helpful in considering your strategy for the case.

But have you ever looked in the metaphorical mirror to figure out if you have tendencies that may be helpful for you to be aware of - in case your opponents have?

This kind of scouting isn’t new in law, it’s the reason jurisdiction shopping or judge shopping exists. People know certain courts or certain judges have a bias that may be favorable or unfavorable. It’s just become easier and deeper with the proliferation of AI tools that can look at large or obscure sets of data to try and identify patterns or biases, however subtle.

While you’re evaluating opposing counsel and the judge, you might want to point your AI tools at yourself and see what you can learn. You may find that you’ve fallen into some patterns you weren’t aware of.