Collective intelligence applied to legal e-discovery: A ten-year case study of Australia franchise and trademark litigation

The purpose of this research is to develop a formal knowledge e‐discovery methodology, using advanced information technology and decision support analysis, to define legal case evolution based on Collective Litigation Intelligence (CLI). In this research, a decade of Australia’s retail franchise and trademark litigation cases are used as the corpus to analyze and synthesize the evolution of modern retail franchise law in Australia. The formal processes used in the legal e‐discovery research include a LexisNexis search strategy to collect legal documents, text mining to find key concepts and their representing key phrases in the documents, clustering algorithms to associate the legal cases into groups, and concept lattice analysis to trace the evolutionary trends of the main groups. The case analysis discovers the fundamental issues for retail modernization, advantages and disadvantages of retail franchising systems, and the potential litigation hazards to be avoided in the Australian market. Given the growing number of legal documents in global court systems, this research provides a systematic and generalized CLI methodology to improve the efficiency and efficacy of research across international legal systems. In the context of the case study, the results demonstrate the critical importance of quickly processing and interpreting existing legal knowledge using the CLI approach. For example, a brand management company, which purchases a successful franchise in one market is under limited time constraints to evaluate the legal environment across global markets of interest. The proposed CLI methodology can be applied to derive market entry strategies to secure growth and brand expansion of a global franchise.