New York Lawyers Success Blog

In my day to day exploration of various data mining tools, I came across Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a not-for-profit research center at Syracuse University, which has developed a web-based data warehouse/data mining application. TRACFed is already use by reporters, lobbyists groups, and Congressional committees.

What has this have to do with lawyers?  TRACFed could be a good tool to allow lawyers to confirm their anecdotal impressions against actual historical data.  For example, how quickly do cases move through Judge A’s court? How often will a named prosecutor turn down certain types of cases?  What is the probability that criminal cases investigated by a particular agency result in convictions?

The data mining part comes into play by allowing the researcher to “drill-down” deeper into the data.  For example, one can further research on “Judge A’s” cases to see what type they were, or when they occurred. You can discover that out of 1,000 environment litigation claims disposed of in 2008, only 50 were granted monetary awards.  Not a large amount.  However, you can then click on those 50 which were granted awards and you would discover the average, range, where the award occurred, and who was involved.

TracFed is a paid site.  It costs $60 a month to run queries. The subscription fees help offset costs associated with updating and maintaining the data warehouse.

For more information see TRAC’s public website at http://trac.syr.edu and TRACFed at http://tracfed.syr.edu.

Ralph Winters is a data miner, statistician, programmer and general All Around IT utility infielder.  He can be reached at rwinters2009 @ gmail.com or via LinkedIn.