This is a LegalHack@OKCon 2013 challenge

Case Success

Every case is unique.

It is often difficult for a lawyer to answer one of the most pressing question of his client: What are my chances of success if we go to court (or if I plea non-guilty)? The challenge is to provide lawyers and clients with an accurate base rate of success or average amount for a similar claim. At the end of the day, the decision is always taken by a judge on the basis of the evidence and arguments in front of him. However, when you have a database of thousands of these decisions, you can start seeing trends and probablities.

Law case databases like CanLii from Canada (also see Beta Site) offer exhaustive decisions from a certain court for a certain period of times. What kind of metadata would allow easily to compile such statistics?

Example use cases:

Hackathon goals

  1. Create a database with parties names, status (plaintiff or defendant) and the result (who won the case);
  2. Push the database forward by including the amount of the claim and the result;
  3. Create a website where the user can query his chances of success;

We could start with these three goals regarding one specific legal action (example: civil liability claims for damages caused by an animal) in front of a specific jurisdiction (example: Cour du Québec). If the goals are too easy, the ultimate goal would be to extend to multiple legal actions or multiple jurisdictions.

Project

(screenshots or sketches up here)

Brief description of your hackday results goes here. Add sections below if you need more room.

Include links to your demo and/or source code.

Data

Team

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