Episode description
Our guest is Nicole Clark, CEO and Founder of Trellis.
Premises liability cases often involve hotly contested legal issues requiring extensive legal research. That's where Trellis comes in.
To start your 14-day Trellis free trial, click here: http://trellis.law/free-trial/activate/On-Premises
Nicole Clark developed Trellis as her own secret weapon. After graduating from Rutgers Law School in 2011, she entered into private practice.
The idea for Trellis was born late one night as Clark was trying to write a complicated motion for summary judgment. She didn’t know much about the judge assigned to the case, which left her unsure about how to structure the document. That’s when a colleague let her browse through his old case files, where she stumbled upon a past ruling by her judge, on her issue, on her motion.
It felt like finally having a detailed study guide to a final exam. She won her motion for summary judgment and everything changed.
With the help of a few software developers, Clark began aggregating state trial court data to use in her own private practice, slowly accumulating an ever-expanding database of tentative rulings issued by the judges in Southern California.
This helped solve her own need for access to state trial court data and analytics. Clark used these rulings to structure and organize every motion that came across her desk, weaving the facts of each case into the types of arguments highlighted by her specific judge. The results? Her motion practice proliferated.
Clark knew her secret weapon couldn’t—and shouldn’t—stay a secret forever. It quickly became obvious to her that there was a massive opportunity to build a thriving, scalable legal analytics platform, one that would help democratize access for state trial court data. And she wanted to be the one to build it.
Clark continues to share everything she has learned over the years about legal analytics with other legal professionals, authoring articles for ABA Journal, New York Law Journal, Texas Lawyer, and Santa Barbara Lawyer. She is also regularly featured as a legal expert for Southern California Record, and she has appeared as a guest on podcasts produced by Above the Law and Corporate Counsel Business Journal.
Host Law Firm Website: https://www.beacon.legal/