Trellis
An Analytical Approach to Legal Research

Legal research has traditionally focused on appellate courts, leaving trial courts—where much litigation unfolds—fragmented and hard to access. This limitation poses challenges for legal professionals facing high risks and costs at the trial level, as traditional methods cannot efficiently extract critical insights from thousands of county-level courts. The legal industry has lacked a unified system for assessing these risks, making informed decisions, and managing litigation effectively. This gap calls for a fresh approach to legal data and research.

Trellis addresses this need by providing access to state trial court data through an AI-powered platform designed to deliver deep insights into trial court records and judicial analytics. The platform aggregates fragmented trial court information from thousands of county-level courts, transforming unstructured data into actionable insights.

“We go into every single court at a county level and aggregate their data, then format it to make meaning out of it,” says Nicole Clark, CEO of Trellis.

While most traditional legal research platforms focus on appellate court decisions, Trellis simplifies research by focusing on trial courts, where clients face the greatest litigation exposure. The platform organizes this unstructured data and provides insights into judges, law firms, and specific cases, enabling legal teams to assess risk and develop optimized litigation strategies. Trellis allows users to search virtually the entire U.S. court system with a single query, generating analytics that guide decisions on whether to settle or contest cases.

Trellis also offers detailed analytics on judges and law firms, providing insights into their historical performance, case handling, and decision-making tendencies. This data-driven approach supports legal professionals in evaluating opposing counsel and their own representation. By leveraging this dataset, legal teams across firms of all sizes can make more informed decisions, reduce legal expenses, and manage cases more effectively across jurisdictions. This unified approach to trial court data resolves traditional fragmentation issues, empowering legal departments and firms with data that was previously scattered or difficult to access.

Trusted Data for Legal Professionals

The platform is trusted by Am Law 200 firms and major corporate legal departments to monitor litigation nationwide. It tracks where companies are being sued, who is filing the lawsuits, and the status of cases—all without the need for frequent updates from costly outside counsel. Trellis also supports business decisions, such as assessing the risks of launching a product in a particular jurisdiction based on local litigation trends. Small and mid-size firms also benefit from Trellis’ granular insights, using analytics to tailor motions and strategies to specific judges’ tendencies and past rulings, making it accessible to a broad range of legal professionals.

Data Confidentiality

Data confidentiality is a top priority for Trellis. The platform relies solely on publicly available legal filings, eliminating the need for users to input sensitive client or internal data. Trellis does not handle personally identifiable information (PII) or any confidential case details, ensuring secure user interactions while still delivering valuable legal insights.

Is AI the Game Changer?

AI tools are central to Trellis’s advantage. Here, AI plays a crucial role in organizing fragmented trial court data from across the U.S., giving Trellis a strong edge over traditional methods. The platform transforms public data into proprietary insights by structuring and layering it with AI-driven analytics. These advanced AI capabilities streamline litigation research and support data-driven decision-making, further establishing Trellis as a leader in legal research innovation.