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Mediate.com: Review of Picture It Settled® Software for Negotiation

As a lawyer, a district judge and now as a mediator for many years now, I have always sought out useful technology tools to make the process work better. I have seen parties use static Excel spreadsheets and midpoint analysis to try to project settlement numbers, but the negotiation process is much more sophisticated than that.
At SMU Law School in Dallas, I teach a survey course on alternative dispute resolution (“ADR”). The course includes segments on negotiation, mediation and arbitration. Our textbook for the negotiation segment referred to software and the internet as negotiation tools, but the tools referenced were merely common sense driven or only superficially useful.

Enter Don Philbin, a lawyer-mediator based in San Antonio who is a highly skilled negotiator. Don had seen a need for technology that could accurately predict negotiation moves and settlements, and he set about building that solution. Enlisting the help of lawyers, statisticians and probability experts, Don created a web-based application called Picture It Settled® which was officially launched at LegalTech New York in late January 2013.

Picture It Settled® is predictive analytics for negotiation, and it derives its power to predict moves and outcomes because Don collected deep data from over 10,000 cases and had them entered into the system. And the more cases that Picture It Settled® learns from, the smarter and more powerful it will become.

Having known Don for years and being intrigued by Picture It Settled®, I invited Don into my classroom to show us how the technology worked. Coincidentally, I had recently mediated an IP case in the Eastern District of Texas in which the Plaintiff’s original demand had been $29 million and the Defendant’s original offer was $450,000. The case settled at 7pm for $8 million after 17 painstaking rounds of negotiation.

Don entered the negotiation moves from this case into the Picture It Settled® online interface live for my class and the software began to show a graphical representation of the potential settlement territory. By only the 2nd round, Picture It Settled® predicted a settlement in the $9 million range, which was only off 3.5% of the $28.55M spread at the time, and the software nailed it in 2 rounds instead of 17! Of course, Picture It Settled® tightened its projection even more as we entered additional offer information. It was truly magical, fascinating – I realized that this tool could be helpful for a broad spectrum of cases.

Picture It Settled® is an incredibly useful tool that will become increasingly powerful as more case data is entered to make it even more intelligent. Any negotiator who wants to be prepared needs to have a tool like this. You can rely on your instincts and experience, but that will only take you so far. This software gives you a better ability to predict which way a case is headed. Whoever uses Picture It Settled® will have a clear advantage over the other party. As a mediator, it will help me keep energy in the process and keep parties at the table longer.

Lawyers have a tendency to be concerned that technology is going to replace them, but that is an unfounded and unwarranted concern with Picture It Settled®. This is a tool to help lawyers and mediators do their jobs better and faster. The psychology of negotiation and mediation will remain the same but the software will help guide the outcome to be more streamlined and advantageous to those who use it.

I am sure that lawyers and mediators will discover the advantages of Picture It Settled®. I challenge anyone to refute that it provides more control over the negotiation process and settlement outcomes. Picture It Settled® is fascinating and very exciting technology. There will come a time when everyone will be using it!

Law Technology News: LegalTech Trek: 88 Days Left [Features Picture It Settled]

Among the LTNY vendors offering predictive tools outside of the realm of discovery was attorney-mediator Don Philbin, who explained his new web service Picture It Settled,” which examines the behavior of negotiators in thousands of cases to predict what an opponent will do.

Lawyers USA: LegalTech 2013: from settlement predictions to social network tracking

Settlement software

Looking to predict the future?

Picture It Settled is here to help. With a few case details, the software will predict the course of negotiations, ending with a prediction of how much the case will settle for.

As a mediator, San Antonio-based Don Philbin said he often had the feeling he knew the direction a settlement negotiation would take. Then he wondered: Could he replicate that feeling using software grounded in data from prior cases?

The answer is yes.

Using information from several thousand cases, the software creates graphs of each side’s negotiation strategy with a settlement prediction where the lines intersect.

“There is a social convention to negotiation,” Philbin said. If one party moves too far outside of social norms — offering way too little for a settlement amount, for example — the negotiation will end.

Lawyers can use Picture It Settled to help guide their negotiation strategy or to help value a case at the outset, Philbin said.

The software was originally released as an app in 2011. More data was gathered over the last few years to launch the website version.

To get a prediction, an attorney enters case metrics such as the jurisdiction, the type of claim involved (patent infringement or soft tissue injury, for example) and an assessment of likely outcomes, with an estimate of the dollar amount for a best and worst case scenario.

Using the Target Settlement feature, a lawyer enters a goal of a $1.5 million settlement, for example. The software then charts out how to make offers to reach that goal, suggesting an initial offer amount and calculating a plan of how to spread out concessionary offers until the party reaches the desired settlement amount.

Predictions are made with 80 percent accuracy and improve the more offer data is provided, Philbin said.

Picture It Settled will be available via subscription as of April 1, 2013. For now, lawyers can use the software free of charge.

The website offers more details at: http://162.242.218.159/

Complex Discovery: Weekly Top Story Digest – February 20, 2013

Don Philbin of Picture It Settled – eDiscovery Trends – http://bit.ly/XkIlzc (Doug Austin)

Complex Discovery: Vendor Clips | February 19, 2013

Don Philbin of Picture It Settled – eDiscovery Trends – http://bit.ly/XkIlzc (Doug Austin)

LTN: Tech Circuit: Pyrotechnics Edition

Lawyer Don Philbin was talking about his new predictive analytics tool, Picture It Settled.

eDiscovery Trends: Don Philbin of Picture It Settled

Today’s thought leader is Don Philbin. Don is a nationally recognized attorney-mediator and is President and founder of Picture It Settled®, a predictive analytics tool for negotiation. Holding both a law degree and an MBA, Don mediates individual and class matters, and he teaches courses at Pepperdine Law’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution. He was one of three Texas mediators listed in the 2011 inaugural edition of The International Who’s Who of Commercial Mediation, and he was named the 2011 Outstanding Lawyer in Mediation by the San Antonio Business Journal. He is an elected fellow of the International Academy of Mediators and the American Academy of Civil Trial Mediators.

Dallas Business Journal: Picture It Settled® Predicts Outcome of Intellectual Property Case Within 3.5% in Just Two Rounds

Picture It Settled® announces today the release of an intellectual property case study written by Will Pryor, Mediator, Arbitrator and Adjunct Professor of SMU Law School in Dallas entitled, “Discovering Picture It Settled, Breakthrough Predictive Analytics Software for Negotiation.” Pryor shares how the highly-intelligent predictive analytics tool that guides inside and outside counsel through the negotiation process, based on deep data harvested from thousands of cases, predicted the outcome of his intellectual property case within 3.5% in just two rounds. That prediction then improved with additional offer data.

Austin American Statesman: Picture It Settled® Predicts Outcome of Intellectual Property Case Within 3.5% in Just Two Rounds

Money News: Picture It Settled® Predicts Outcome of Intellectual Property Case Within 3.5% in Just Two Rounds

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