Dispute Calculator is a free online tool to help lawyers value a claim

Dispute Calculator is a free online tool to help lawyers estimate the probability of success at trial. My barrister friend Robin Somerville and I have put it together over the past few months.

If you just have one issue to resolve, then reaching an estimate of success at trial is easy enough. You’ll use your experience of that issue to estimate how likely you are to win. “In cases like this, I’d expect to win 75% of the time”. Job done.

But if there are a few different issues, and a few different arguments you can advance on each issue, and different amounts of money resting on each outcome, you soon run into some quite tricky arithmetic. You might be able to estimate the probability of each individual issue (“There’s a 50% chance of the judge accepting our argument that the claim is out of time”) but combining these probabilities to get to a realistic overall estimate of success or failure is actually a little hard to do in your head, or even with a spreadsheet.

Dispute Calculator (www.disputecalculator.com) helps with this. You enter each head of claim; note what different arguments you plan to put forward for each head of claim; do the same for what you know about what the other side is planning. Crank the handle, and the system will spit out a little report combining all your estimates, and with one key number at the bottom: the expected value of your claim.

Please give it a try and let us know what you think. This version is definitely in beta, so you might find bugs. Remember, this tool is just to help you correctly combine your own estimates of the success of each element of your case. It can’t help you make the initial estimates - that will be down to your experience.

It is free to use, as our contribution to helping people not to be wrong.

You can use it for free yourself here: www.disputecalculator.com

Video demo below: