Bitesize InsurTech: Premonition

September 15, 2017 George Hanks

Premonition predicts the outcome of court cases and allows parties to determine their strategy.

This is a simple but interesting business. The company has built a database of litigation data and outcomes by aggregating various legal datasets like online court room records. The database can be interrogated for two main purposes:

• Understand which lawyers perform well against which opponents, and in front of which judges
• Understand which lawyers are efficient and therefore cheap, and which run the clock

Parties can then determine their case strategy. For example:

• Lawyers can be selected based on their actual performance in a particular type of litigation
• Lawyers can be switched out depending on who the opposition appoint, or which judge is allocated
• Firms can better benchmark their legal costs

Toby Unwin, Co-Founder, showed us some interesting data. For example, in certain types of litigation, the most frequently hired lawyer is not necessarily the one who wins most cases. There were also some interesting skews in certain lawyer-judge combinations.

Data is richest for the US where more court data is released earlier. Toby is keen to move his product further into insurance.

The Oxbow Partners view

Every claims manager in the US should look into Premonition. We have based this profile on an interview rather than due diligence of the business, but if the correlations that Toby highlights are as powerful as he claims (and therefore predictive), and if these correlations are applicable for a broad range of litigation, then this is a tool which could save insurers millions of dollars.