Once upon a time, Rick Merrill was a real estate litigator in Los Angeles at Greenberg Traurig. And when it came to preparing for a case, he had a few issues.

“I was always frustrated by the difficulty of finding real meaningful, actionable data about the state trial court judges that we were in front of,” Merrill explained. “Greenberg did what every other big firm does,” i.e., send an email around to the office to see who knows what. “That always struck me as limited, because at best you would get anecdotal data about people’s experiences.”