Information is the fuel that drives law offices. Yet extracting intelligence out of the massive amounts of raw information — aka Big Data — now pouring into law offices from court records, emails, text messages, transcripts, Facebook posts, Twitter and other sources requires both careful planning and the help of sophisticated predictive-analytics software.

Predictive analytics draws on a variety of techniques — including statistics, modeling, machine learning and data mining — to study data and make predictions about future events and trends.