The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. And, 22 months later, the legal implications of these changes remain largely unknown. Across the United States, the number of coronavirus-related complaints filed in federal and state courts continues to rise. These legal actions are complex. They’re testing contemporary legal understandings of negligence, causation, and liability, terms that had initially been defined and adjudicated in contexts of relative normality. As Barb Dawson, chair of the Litigation Section of the American Bar Association, explains, “[w]e’re seeing a collision of old laws and frameworks for justice that will be colliding with all new facts.”
While nobody is certain how judges will handle the COVID-19 cases that appear before their benches, it’s important to remember the level of uncertainty that has always existed within the legal system. It can be easy to overlook these uncertainties. After all, the legal system here in the United States relies on legal precedents, a situation which suggests that the outcome of any single case should be fairly predictable. According to Gail Gottehrer, an emerging technologies attorney based in New York City, “[i]f your case is similar and has similar facts to another case, the results shouldn’t be too surprising.”
The problem, however, is that the results often are surprising. Judges aren’t computers. They are people, filled with their own beliefs and their own experiences, both of which shape how they interpret laws, apply facts, and consider arguments. With that said, lawyers can’t simply feed competing arguments into the bench and expect predictable outcomes. Something else is needed, a tool that can help attorneys navigate through the uncertain, uncharted waters of a lawsuit. By harnessing the power of state trial court data, judicial analytics is poised to fill this gap, helping attorneys grapple with the twists and turns of the litigation landscape in our unprecedented times
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