Research from an open source community for legal practitioners, today released the results from its annual survey.

It revealed an uptick in analytics usage by in-house legal departments.

“We are excited to present our annual research demonstrating the use and proliferation of advanced analytics in the legal community,” said Philip Favro, director of legal education and resources at CTRL. “The CTRL survey demonstrates that today’s practitioners are more bullish than ever at putting these cutting-edge technologies to work.”

Analytics will be “indispensable” to the legal industry, as with many other professions. The overwhelming majority (99%) of respondents agreed and thought that data analytics will be absolutely necessary to the legal profession over the next 10 years.

>See also: The legal sector: a CIO and AI love affair?

e-Discovery will benefit in particular and lead the way when integrated with data analytics.

e-Discovery practitioners pointed to culling, early case assessment and fact finding as their 3 top analytics use cases.

Twice as many legal departments confirmed their intention of using analytics for matter management and 71% predict increased spending.
It is also predicted that there will be a dramatic Increase of analytics use in information governance.

The survey respondents confirmed using advanced analytics in defensible disposition (83%), policy compliance (83%), data migration (82%), and automated content categorisation (72%) with the latter showing a 50% year-over-year increase.

Furthermore, there will be an exponential growth in analytics for contract review: five times as many legal departments say they will start using analytics for contract review in 2017 over last year.

>See also: Could AI take over the legal profession?

“Marc Andreessen famously once quipped that ‘software is eating the world,’ and the same can be said today about the pervasiveness of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics in the legal world, said Dean Gonsowski, executive director of CTRL and VP Business development at kCura.

“It is great to see the breadth of analytics applications increasing dramatically year-over-year among in-house counsel looking to apply more process efficiencies and cost savings to their legal operations. We believe these trends will continue to transform the legal community and drive the next wave of increased efficiency and innovation.”