If you are interviewing for a litigation-focused position, to get an overview of a firm, attorney or judge's practice profile.
Chambers | Associate - this "Student's Guide to the Legal Profession" offers quick charts on diversity and rankings, and summer program projections. The Bonus Features tab for a firm often includes tips from recruiters and recent summer associates. Participation by law firm recruiters means you are seeing the firm in the way they would like to be presented to prospective summer associates, so with that caveat in mind, dig in.
Bloomberg Law, Lexis+ and Westlaw each offer legal analytics tools that can help you get an overview of a law firm. These tools aggregate dockets, trial court materials, and case opinion collections to visualize and summarize information about law firms (and individual attorneys or judges) in the form of graphs, charts, and linked lists. You can quickly view current litigation involving a law firm or attorney; find out which clients or industry sectors a law firm or attorney represents most frequently, or what law firm is retained most frequently by a given company; sort through a judge's current caseload by type of case and find out about their ruling patterns on different types of motions; and much more.
Bloomberg Law Litigation Analytics - review federal court data on law firms, attorneys, and judges, as well as client companies, via docket data visualizations that allow you to track trends over time and filter by practice areas and jurisdiction. You can even deep dive into significant docket and litigation documents to read complaints and motion papers. This 5-minute walkthrough shows the main features for exploring from the perspective of a client company or a law firm (individual attorney, judge, and court profiles are also covered).
Lexis+ Litigation Profile Suite - a snapshot bio and visualizations of docket and verdicts/settlements data on individual attorneys and judges. A sidebar on the left side also points you to basic biographical sources (Directories), publications mentioning or authored by the individual, and legal and general news stories (In the News). This step-by-step guide on Litigation Profile Suite shows how to understand and sort your results; note: the guide shows access via Lexis Advance; in Lexis+ look for a nine-dot product menu near the top left of the start screen - pull down and select Litigation Profile Suite.
Westlaw Litigation Analytics - review current cases, types of matters handled, outcomes, motions, and dockets for law firms or individual attorneys; for judges, explore rulings patterns, categories of caseloads, time to ruling on motions, and commonly cited authorities. Westlaw offers an online tutorial introducing judicial data, but as noted at the end, the same methods can be applied in looking at data on law firms and individual attorneys.
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