High stakes decisions demand leading litigation data & analytics

Key challenges

Phoenix Group sought a litigation analytics solution to enhance their decision-making process and guide senior stakeholder decisions. Specifically, this focused on seeking to contextualise case outcome prospects and length to garner internal support and evaluate opponent litigation tendencies before making strategic decisions. This was key for delivering better informed and supported decisions, including with the company board and senior executives.

Key solutions

Phoenix Group successfully fostered firmwide adoption by integrating data seamlessly into their litigation assessment, making it integral to their decision-making process. The group now use the Solomonic platform to obtain precise data and analytics on key metrics to advise their clients.

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The situation

The Phoenix Group is the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 index. With c.12 million customers, Phoenix’s mission is to help everyone achieve the retirement they want and stay with them for the whole journey.  

Grant McCaig, Head of Legal for Service, Integration and Operations at Phoenix, is responsible for litigation management and dispute resolution across the group and was seeking ways to better manage stakeholder expectations, enhance decision-making and operate more effectively.

The task

In litigation, presenting information to stakeholders is critical to managing expectations and getting their support for the right strategies and decisions. Legal professionals have historically shied away from incorporating data and statistics into their litigation assessments, preferring to rely on their own judgment and experience. However, this carries risks and ambiguities and is frustrating for data driven senior business leaders.  

One of the challenges faced by Grant and his in-house team was the need to articulate the merits and risk assessments to their sophisticated and numbers driven business stakeholders, including company boards and senior executives. Reliance on legal terms such as “better of the arguments”, “finely balanced” or “good prospects” would no longer cut it as these terms failed to adequately convey the spectrum of litigation risk. As such, Grant recognised that there is a requirement for data in the legal assessment both to help decision makers better understand a case and also to build confidence.

“My stakeholders increasingly demanded further clarity to make better informed decisions based on the advice they receive. It became evident that relying solely on traditional methods was insufficient in an increasingly data-driven world,” said Grant.

The action

With a desire to better understand its litigation risk profile, Phoenix turned to Solomonic, as the leading solution provider of litigation data and analytics, recognising the value rigorous information brings to high stakes decisions.  

The Solomonic platform encompasses a comprehensive solution that simplifies the process of conducting due diligence on various metrics to support client advice. It provides accessible analytical views on outcome patterns, case duration, judgment and judge decision history, litigation history or outcomes of competitors, all of which contribute to effectively managing client expectations with data rooted in robust analysis.

Working with Solomonic, Phoenix was able to better define the context for key decisions on their key cases using data and therefore able to give stakeholders comfort that the legal advice was from a position of historical evidence, detail, and authority. This included answering questions about case length, likelihood of success at trial and chances of settlement.

For example, knowing that cases of the same type in the same court only fully succeed in a small percentage of concluded cases helps stakeholders understand that outside of the case specific merits, cases may be an uphill battle to persuade the court.

Similarly, knowing your opponent is a serial litigator but tends to settle pre-trial is helpful knowledge when considering strategy.

“The data doesn’t tell them what to decide, but it helps inform them on how to decide it - it gives them a frame of reference,” noted Grant.

Being able to call upon specific percentages and data is not only of significantly more use to a decision maker but is likely to lead to a better informed and defensible decision.

The result

The team’s ability to provide informed advice based on comprehensive data and analytics enhanced Grant’s advice offering, strengthening relationships and enhancing the decision-making process.

“Now that Solomonic litigation analytics are available to my organisation, they have become a core part of the litigation assessment,” said Grant. “I can’t imagine not including relevant data as part of our decision-making process.”