In the September/October 2026 issue of CLM Magazine, Chad Karls, co-founder of Milliman Datalytics Defense discusses the technologies that are improving litigation management. Questions addressed include: How specifically are technologies adding value? What are the most important components of a modern litigation management strategy? Beyond legal spend and outcome, what metrics genuinely measure whether litigation management is working?

Key takeaways:

• The technologies that help clients turn their existing litigation information into usable data are making the biggest difference to truly improve litigation management. Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics are powerful for identifying patterns that cannot be discerned manually.
• Unstructured data contained in certain litigation systems is invaluable once it is extracted, normalized, and made available.
• The ability to leverage detailed data in a timely fashion is a critically important component of a modern litigation management strategy, with credible benchmarks to evaluate litigation events from a cost and success rate perspective.
• Rigorous legal partner evaluations should include consideration of the types of cases assigned and known variables that impact the cost and outcome.
• Outcome is the most important metric when measuring whether litigation management is working. Yet in some ways it is a lagging metric since it happens at the end of litigation.
• The timeliness with which the litigants’ depositions happen is a predictive metric that also should be monitored. On average, the longer a claim takes to resolve, the more costly it tends to be from both a legal expense and indemnity perspective.
• Sometimes settling early at an amount above a historical or predicted value makes sense if the case is expected to move slowly through the system in an expensive jurisdiction. This is where data can play an important role.
• Historical litigation data and predictive analytics can provide context around what similar cases have cost, how long they have taken to resolve, and what outcomes have occurred under comparable circumstances.
• Ultimately, successful litigation management is about making better data-driven decisions consistently and not simply trying to achieve the lowest possible settlement on one case.

Download the full article (PDF).