Alexsei Memos Setting Precedent

An important part of creating any successful product or service is understanding how it’s used. This holds true for lawyers who provide a service to their clients, and it holds true for legal tech startups who provide products to those lawyers.At Alexi, we regularly consult with our users so as to better understand their needs. To get an even fuller understanding, we recently analyzed the caselaw to see how our memos have been used, and how they’ve influenced decisions. And today, we wanted to share the following 5 insights we learned from completing this analysis:

1. Courts agree

One crucial aspect, both for us to ensure quality, and for the lawyers who use Alexi to be confident that they’re getting precise answers, is that we set out the law correctly.The courts have agreed with the statements of law set out in Alexi memos in well over 98% of all memos corresponding to a reported decision. Most interestingly, however, all decisions where a court disagreed with the law as set out in the corresponding Alexi memo were later overturned on appeal, and the appeal decision confirmed the points of law as set out in the Alexi memo! Alexi‘s role is to provide lawyers with objective statements of the law at a given point in time, whatever that may be. And when the courts are the final arbiters of what the law is, it is critical for us that the case law judgments corresponding to an Alexi memo support our conclusions time and time again.

2. Lawyers rely on our memos when they’re handling appeals

Of the memos which were identified as informing a reported decision, a full 50% were used in an appeal. In part, this may be because a higher percentage of appellate-level decisions are reported. To us, it also suggests that lawyers who use Alexi especially use it to inform their appellate strategy:

3. Lawyers rely on our memos for things they’re dealing with now, and things they’ll have to deal with later

When looking at the distribution of days elapsed between the production of an Alexi memo and a corresponding decision, we see that a decision is most frequently published 0-120 days and 240-300 days after the memo was produced.This suggests that lawyers rely on Alexi both for urgent matters that they need an immediate answer for, and for matters they know are coming down the road which will require serious deliberation.Indeed, sometimes it can be as long as 2 years from the date we have provided a memo, to the date of the decision that it impacts.

4. Lawyers rely on our memos for questions involving multiple practice areas

By using Alexi memos, lawyers quickly and easily understand the impact of different areas of law on their case. Difficult questions regularly arise at the intersections of practice areas.Of the memos impacting decisions that we’ve identified, 35% touched on more than 1 practice area. In practice, that means that a lawyer who regularly practices, for example, personal injury law, can quickly and affordably understand the impact of a corporate defendant’s CCAA restructuring.

5. Lawyers rely on our memos to assist them in every practice area

Our service covers all practice areas. However, as we all know, most cases are settled prior to any decisions being generated. This makes it all the more interesting that our memos have had an impact on decisions in a broad array of practice areas.To us, this suggests that lawyers trust and rely on our memos no matter the underlying practice area.