The 2017 American football season has begun but we have our sights set on another type of fantasy league: Fantasy SCOTUS!

​Fantasy SCOTUS is the leading Supreme Court Fantasy League, whereby thousands of attorneys and law students make predictions about cases before the Supreme Court of The United States.
 
This data provides researchers with an ample source of information to predict SCOTUS outcomes.
 
There are three strategies Fantasy SCOTUS employed to predict legal outcomes:
 
1. Expert opinion;
2. Crowd-sourcing; and
3. Algorithms.
 
But which is the most accurate?
 
Experts on the 2002 – 2003 Supreme Court Term predicted 58% of cases and 67.4% of Justice votes. The champion of predicting Supreme Court cases was Jacob Berlove, who correctly predicted cases more than 80% of the time.
 
LexPredict uses crowds to predict Supreme Court cases, although not all crowd-members are treated equally. LexPredict’s super crowd, dubbed the “Expert Crowd”, is composed of the most accurate predictors of SCOTUS cases. The Expert Crowd predicted…84.29% of cases and 84.18% of Justice votes.
 
Meanwhile, a team of researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and South Texas College of Law threw their hat into the ring by developing an algorithm that predicts SCOTUS cases. The algorithm correctly predicted 70.2% of the Supreme Court’s 28,000 decisions and 71.9% of the Justices’ 240,000 votes.
 
So which approach is best? At Wortzmans, we believe that Lawyers + Machines > Humans or Machines. The most accurate method is a combination of experts, crowds and algorithms, but the apportionment of weight is critical.
 
Experts argue that a combination of a “super crowd” and machine learning could assist lawyers in framing their arguments to be successful in the courtroom. Law firms, corporations and banks could use a combination of experts, crowds and algorithms to predict how courts will decide a commercial matter. In the criminal law sphere, an algorithm, a combination of experts, crowds and algorithms could predict the likely sentence of an accused according to a specific judge.
 
Our team at Wortzmans uses a combination of highly skilled experts, review lawyers, cutting edge e-Discovery technology and techniques to give our clients the best possible results.