In a low-rise building in Menlo Park, Calif., just upstairs from a Mexican restaurant and a nail salon, a Stanford University spin-off is crunching data in ways that could shake the foundations of the legal profession.
Here, a small group of patent lawyers and computer scientists is applying the latest in machine learning and natural-language processing to reams of documents related to intellectual property lawsuits. The result is a massive statistical database on IP litigation like nothing the world has seen before.