RSS and CfS afternoon on Decision-Support in Litigation

On 6 December 2019, the Centre for Statistics organised a meeting on “Decision-support in litigation” jointly with the Statistics and Law Section of the Royal Statistical Society.

There were three speakers – John MacKenzie from the law firm Shepherd and Wedderburn, Dr Alex Biedermann from the University of Lausanne and Dr Wen Zhang from the London School of Economics. John MacKenzie spoke on the legal procedure and where there are opportunities for statisticians and data scientists to have an impact, Dr Alex Biedermann spoke on a decision theoretic approach using Bayesian Networks for making decisions in legal trials and Wen Zhang spoke about a project she has been working on with the law firm BLM. The meeting finished with a panel session chaired by Jamie Gardiner from Ampersand Advocates, where some of the points raised by the presentations were discussed further – these points included difficulties with access to datasets, the role of subjective probabilities in legal decision-making and the effective communication of probabilities between statisticians, lawyers and clients. More details of the event and recordings of the talks are available here.  

Many thanks to the organisers and speakers.