Thomson Reuters & CodeX have announced the winners of the 2015 Legal Tech Open Innovation Challenge.

“Two individuals and two corporations from around the globe took the top spots this year for the 2015 Legal Tech Open Innovation Challenge sponsored by Thomson Reuters and CodeX. Praescient Analytics received the first prize award of $20,000 for their creation of an application to help legal practitioners predict likely outcomes for motions to dismiss,” the two organizations stated in a joint press release today.

The awards were presented at Stanford Law School on November 19, where the top winners demonstrated their technology.

“The Legal Tech Open Innovation Challenge saw legal professionals, technologists, data scientists and entrepreneurs from around the globe compete to create unique technology applications that provide high-value analytics to legal practitioners. Participants were given access to editorially-enhanced federal court dockets content, outside data, and the Thomson Reuters open-source company-identification system, PermID, to develop the new applications,” the press release states.

First Place

Praescient Analytics of Alexandria, Va., won first place for its creation of iHammurabi—(the name is an homage to the Babylon ruler attributed with creating the code of laws).

“It leverages docket data to create a model predicting the likelihood for success of motions to dismiss before a specific judge in federal civil court based on key factors about the case.  The opportunity to work with five years of court data was invaluable,” said Adam Reese of Praescient Analytics. “We were able to create a more accurate model that gives users a better understanding of a particular legal situation and likely outcomes.”

“This year’s challenge exceeded our expectations,” said Dr. Roland Vogl, executive director, CodeX. “More than 450 online project rooms were opened around the world, resulting in many unique entries being submitted. We look forward to working with Thomson Reuters to continue to explore ways to stimulate and uncover new innovations, wherever in the world they may emerge.”

Other winners were:

• Second place:  Alexander Buese of Germany earned the second place and $15,000. He created a tool that helps users uncover trends and patterns among a variety of entities involved in litigation matters.

• Tied for third place, “and awarded $10,000 each, were EPAM Systems Inc., an international software engineering company, and Muthukumarasamy Karthikeyan, a scientist in Puna Area, India. EPAM’s entry took the provided data to build a prediction model to forecast docket outcomes, and built a mechanism using contextual search to find similar dockets. Muthukumarasamy Karthikeyan’s program was configured to read about 100,000 records at once from a single file for greater efficiency,” the press release said.

• Runners up were Boris Beric and Millicent Tan.

“We congratulate Praescient and all of this year’s Challenge participants,” said Carlos Gamez, senior director of Innovation for the legal business of Thomson Reuters. “Our customers are increasingly looking to the next generation of [technologies] to build and advance a better functioning legal system. Our partnership with CodeX allows us to combine our proprietary content and domain expertise with a broad range of leading technologists to further fuel innovation and advance the practice of law.”

Watch the video here.

I’ll be posting more information about the event shortly!

Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX and a freelance journalist for Bloomberg BNA Big Law Business. She is a member of the California bar. @MonicaBay. Email: mbay@codex.stanford.edu.