“Rhetoric,” a firm from Ona, utilizes artificial intelligence to study judges and courts nationwide.
Ona residents Luke Yingling and Daniel Scarr created the software.
“I published research papers as a master’s student,” Yingling remarked. I wanted to apply that work to legal issues because I loved it.
Rhetoric incorporated April 2021.
I ran the firm while in school. Yingling stated, “We were busy with two young kids.” “I went full-time after graduating from West Virginia University College of Law.”
CEO Yingling and CPO Scarr. West Virginians comprise their chief technology officer, full-time sales and marketing staffer, and summer intern.
“One of our contractors is from Alabama,” Yingling remarked. That’s the main crew presently. We also have investors and advisers.”
Rhetoric has developed since the AI was launched.
“We are building cohorts of five to continue measuring the product’s performance as we transition from beta testing to full-fledged launch,” Yingling added.
“We are still putting together these cohorts but have several firms lined up and committed to using the products, while others are currently making a purchase.
Right now, we have a business in Charleston that’s preparing to utilize it on a Fourth Circuit case they think could go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they’ve already asked us if they can use Supreme Court data.”
Yingling and Scarr have observed that judge information is poor.
Yingling thought it was scarce and low-quality. Judges might provide descriptive metrics. I could tell you that Judge X rules 52% of the time for the plaintiff, but it didn’t assist you understand how to exploit that knowledge in an actionable way that gave you a competitive advantage.”
Many legal companies want to know if a judge is textualist or originalist.
“We stand alone in answering those kinds of questions with our platform,” Scarr added. “One thing we find interesting is that lawyers often have an idea of how a judge rules or if they interpret the law in a very textualist manner and consider themselves textualist. A lawyer may argue that a judge is a textualist. We’d utilize a data-driven method to highlight the intricacies in someone’s view of the law.
A court judge may claim to be the most textualist. We examine the statistics and conclude that you’re the court’s second or third most textualist judge. You’re original on this. Judge X of the Southern District of West Virginia has issued 50 opinions this year. Our technology, which is AI-driven, analyzes those viewpoints to provide this sequence of analyses.”
Yingling wanted to give consumers something they could use to persuade judges and gain a competitive edge.
“We saw a chance to explain judges. What are their thoughts and what can we teach lawyers? We intended to give useful material.
Scarr notes legal technology has several research tools for law firms.
“They help you draft your briefs, but part of the novel aspect of ours that nobody else is doing is we analyze the judge’s jurisprudence and sentiment to provide detailed, rhetorical insights about the judge so that you can draft your brief with context about the way the judge interprets the law,” he said. Our research tools give you an edge, not save time.
