Additional RECAP filters or visualizations

[rlfordon]

I've attempted to put this into the issue template:

Headline

Enhancing RECAP with Advanced Litigation Analytics Filters

What is the Feature?

This feature would introduce advanced filtering capabilities within RECAP to allow users to refine searches and generate litigation analytics. Users would be able to answer detailed questions about law firms, judges, case types, and motion outcomes using precise filters.

What Problem Might it Solve?

Currently, while RECAP has the necessary data to provide litigation analytics, users cannot currently filter results finely enough to extract meaningful insights. Existing litigation analytics tools provide this functionality, but RECAP lacks the ability to display results by refined categories, making it difficult for users to conduct in-depth analysis.

Describe a Scenario in Which the Feature Might be Used

• A legal researcher wants to know how often a specific law firm has appeared before a particular judge in a certain district.
• A journalist is investigating antitrust litigation trends and needs to determine which district court has handled the highest percentage of such cases.
• A law firm wants to assess its track record in class action defenses in California Federal District Courts.
• An attorney is analyzing motion success rates and needs to determine how often motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim have been granted by a specific judge.

This feature would enable users to obtain this information quickly, improving usability and making RECAP a more powerful research tool.

Technical Requirements

• Difficulty Level: Medium
• Estimated Development Time: Several weeks to a few months, depending on implementation complexity.
• Technical Considerations:
  • Create structured filtering capabilities that allow users to refine search results by various controlled vocabulary terms including judge, case type, and court.
  • Display numerical results per category to give users immediate insights.
  • Ensure filters work efficiently without compromising system performance.

Existing Systems or Alternatives?

Several commercial products provide litigation analytics, but they are often costly and proprietary. RECAP already has the necessary data, but the lack of advanced filtering limits its usefulness. By implementing this feature, RECAP can provide a free and open alternative to these expensive analytics tools. Although some legal research tools are available via bar memberships, the subscriptions typically do not include analytics.

Any Additional Information?

• This feature would significantly improve usability by allowing users to see the number of results per category.
• It could be useful for legal professionals, journalists, researchers, and firms seeking data-driven insights.
• This could be an advanced product available only to members.

[mlissner]

I haven't used any of these commercial tools. Do you have any screenshots or mock ups of how we'd integrate this? I feel like this could be a whole new UI, but maybe it's not as complicated as I'm imagining.

One other thing that I'm thinking is that we don't put all of the fields we have into searchable fields in the search engine because they take up memory, so we'd have to do that, and possibly calculate other fields (like outcome) that we'd want to put into Elastic.

[rlfordon]

Here's an example from Bloomberg. You can see that courts and NOS both show up on the left as filters, but the filter also shows a number in parentheses to indicate how many results are in each entry.