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Law firms
Solomonic provides a summary dashboard for all firms that shows their number of cases, how often they act for claimant/defendant, and the settlement vs trial percentage. The landing page for the firm also shows their active current cases.
By clicking on the dropdown below the Overview section you can also see the detailed outcome data, a list of all claims the firm has worked on and their key relationships (parties, barristers, counterparties and so on).
You can also generate a report on a law firm using the Report Builder tool via My Reports in your account menu. The report pulls together all of the data for that firm such as key relationships, average claim value, average time to trial, recent cases and so on.
Barristers
Solomonic provides information on over 4,000 barristers.
Note that the Solomonic data on barristers is incomplete. They capture data on a barrister’s cases mainly from reported judgments and interim decisions. Many first instance decisions are not reported of course so those unreported cases are nor credited to the barristers who appeared. Similarly they only capture data from the mainstream High Court - not the appellate courts, the administrative courts or (as at November 2023) the Competition Appeal Tribunal.
In the last couple of years Solomonic have started to obtain copies of Claim Forms and Particulars of Claim which will give information about the barrister(s) for the Claimant. But they do not do the same with Defences, so if a barrister is instructed by a Defendant and drafts the Defence, the case will not be credited to the barrister in Solomonic until such time as there is a published judgment or interim decision/order.
Noting that slight limitation, you can still use the platform to identify which barristers have most experience of particular types of case, which side they tend to act for and the average value of the claims they have worked on.
Just search all barristers and filter by topic and/or court. In the example below it shows which silks have appeared most often in the Commercial Court in recent years.
And you can then look at their win/lose track record at trial, the judges they are most known to and their recent cases.
By clicking on the comments section in the drop down menu you can also find limited comments from judges on the barrister, albeit these are pretty bland for the most part.
Experts
The Solomonic database contains details of over 2,400 experts. It is based on experts who have given evidence in a reported High Court trial as that is the only source they have available. So it is not, and does not claim to be, a directory of experts.
One very basic thing you can do however is to search for experts in a particular discipline and see how often they have given evidence in a reported judgment. So for example if you wanted a handwriting expert you would get these results.
This might help you identify a more diverse list of potential experts.
You can then look at the case details for each expert and see comments by judges about them in reported judgments, some of which provide helpful insight. Here are examples of conflicting judicial views on an expert on Russian law, Vladimir Gladyshev who has five reported judgments to his name
Judges
The judges section of Solomonic can be accessed here Judges and lists all of their judgments/decisions (interim decisions and final hearings). Remember Solomonic only covers reported High Court judgments, it doesn’t currently include for example the appellate courts. If you click on the judge’s name you get a dashboard view like the one here Judge overview which shows their recent judgments, how often the Claimant succeeds in their cases and what percentage of their judgments have been appealed.
If you click on the drop down arrow next to the Overview you can see additional information including the judge’s comments on specific barristers and experts. If you select “Appealed judgments” you will see how many times they have been appealed and the result of those appeals, you can filter the report to show appeals against final decisions/trial judgments only. The first column in the report below shows that at the time of writing Mr Justice Knowles has been appealed 24 times and that 62% of those appeals have failed. You can also compare that to the average across all judges. A link to the report can be found here Appealed judgments analysis
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