Legal Intelligence Assets: From Signal to Case Generation

Evidence of legal violations is often buried in large volumes of disorganized data spread across public sources. Although the information exists, connecting it requires the right technology, intelligence, and legal expertise. Powered by AI and web intelligence and supported by legal experts, Darrow has developed a series of legal intelligence assets to detect these violations before they escalate. Our assets continuously scan, analyze, and connect data to surface early signals of legal harm.

In my previous article, Using Legal Intelligence to Turn Data Into Justice, I shared a broad overview of how Darrow’s legal intelligence infrastructure operates. In this article, I’ll take you deeper into the specifics, offering a closer look at how our legal intelligence assets function.

Introducing Legal Intelligence Assets

To understand Darrow's methodology, it's helpful to compare it to traditional intelligence operations. In national security and law enforcement, an intelligence asset refers to a person, resource, or tool that provides access to hidden information that would otherwise remain concealed until it's too late to prevent harm.

In the legal intelligence context, we've adapted this intelligence paradigm to a digital context. Darrow’s methodology uses proprietary Legal Intelligence Assets, micro-SaaS tools that scan relevant data points scattered around different web sources, to identify patterns of legal violations. 

It’s important to note: We only extract information from publicly available sources and never bypass security protocols or engage in any form of hacking. Our methodology is built on transparency, legality, and respect for data privacy.

Our team uses a combination of AI, web intelligence and human expertise to create assets that act as "informants" in the digital realm. They continuously monitor, collect, and analyze publicly available information to detect signals that indicate legal wrongdoing at scale.

Legal Intelligence Assets in Action: Case Category Examples

To illustrate how our Legal Intelligence Assets function in different contexts, let's look at four legal domains in which Darrow operates: medical product liability, financial and fiduciary misconduct, and data privacy. 

Environmental Violations

Environmental harm is difficult to detect because evidence is scattered across emissions data, contamination databases, regulatory filings, and unstructured community complaints. 

Our assets:

• Map high-risk zones using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that layer pollution sources, environmental testing results, and public complaints to identify areas where legal thresholds are likely exceeded.
  
  
• Analyze unstructured community data through AI models that extract symptom patterns, severity levels, and locations from thousands of emails, forums, and public comments.
  
  
• Identify recurring fact patterns that link shared contaminants, symptoms, and facilities across diverse sources to build strong causation narratives.
  
  
• Validate findings using exposure models and statistical analysis to confirm that signals meet legal standards for harm, liability, and jurisdiction.

Medical Product Liability

Each year, millions of people in the US are harmed or killed by defective drugs and medical devices. Yet most legal teams struggle to detect viable claims early due to fragmented and dense data spread across multiple sources, including FDA reports, global safety databases, product labels, scientific publications, and litigation records.

Our assets detect, evaluate, and cluster this data to identify emerging patterns of harm and uncover causally viable mass tort opportunities across both pharmaceuticals and medical devices. 

They do so by:

• Monitoring for subtle formula changes that manufacturers don’t publicize
  
  
• Detecting clusters of similar adverse event reports across platforms
  
  
• Correlating product changes with emerging health complaints
  
  
• Identifying statistical relationships between product use and specific health outcomes

Just like a human intelligence asset who might alert authorities to dangerous manufacturing practices, our digital assets surface potential safety issues long before they become widely known. For example, we recently identified a personal care product reformulation that introduced harmful ingredients to consumers months before attorneys filed the first lawsuits.

Financial & Fiduciary Misconduct

In securities fraud and ERISA cases, our assets perform at a scale that would require hundreds of human analysts, scanning thousands of financial disclosures, retirement plan filings, and investment records to uncover subtle patterns of misconduct that traditional methods would miss entirely.

Our assets:

• Detect discrepancies between public disclosures and regulatory filings
  
  
• Analyze timing relationships between corporate decisions and financial outcomes
  
  
• Monitor patterns in insider trading and plan investments for irregularities
  
  
• Identify statistical anomalies in financial performance and fund management

To illustrate how our assets operate in the ERISA space, it’s important to understand why these violation types are so difficult to uncover in the first place:

• Sorting through the Form 5500 database to detect underperforming funds is complex and tedious.
• The process demands extensive manual cross-referencing and careful reconciliation of fund names, which are often complicated by inconsistent spellings and abbreviations. 
• Plan investments are frequently hidden in collective trusts or target-date funds.

Our technology scans millions of financial records and compares all relevant 401(k) plans, sifting through the data to identify high-value claims that would otherwise remain undiscovered. We then match entries from the Form 5500 database to investable options using probabilistic modeling in seconds. 

To date, we’ve identified original ERISA cases worth a total of $7.5 billion in damages. We empower law firms to hold corporations accountable and restore financial justice to those who are often left in the dark about their retirement savings.

Data Privacy

Individuals often have little visibility or control over how their personal data is shared, and apps and websites routinely collect this information and share it with third parties. In many cases, this happens without the user’s knowledge or consent, and data is often repurposed for targeted advertising or behavioral profiling.

To detect these violations before they escalate, Darrow’s legal intelligence assets maintain constant surveillance across the web and app ecosystem, detecting violations early enough for meaningful intervention. Here’s a few examples of how are assets detect and evaluate signals indicated data privacy violations:

• Track changes in privacy policies and compare them with actual data practices
• Monitor consumer complaints for patterns suggesting systematic violations
• Analyze security incidents for evidence of negligent data protection
• Correlate regulatory investigations with specific corporate practices

These signals often point to violations under a range of privacy laws. Darrow focuses on causes of action such as:

• Wiretap and Pen Register statutes
• Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA)
• Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)
• Genetic Information Privacy Act (GIPA)
• Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA)
• Right of publicity violations
• State surveillance and consumer privacy laws
• And more

The Human Element: Intelligence Analysts

While Darrow’s technology scans, clusters, and normalizes data at scale, it is our Legal Intelligence Analysts who determine which signals matter and why.

Our analysts apply their intelligence skills and legal expertise to shape raw findings into fully developed class action and mass tort opportunities. They interpret results through the lens of litigation strategy, legal precedent, and regulatory frameworks.

This work includes tasks such as:

• Determining whether a signal aligns with an actionable legal theory
  
  
• Assessing causation, liability, and potential harm within complex datasets
  
  
• Validating signals against regulatory alerts, past litigation, and public records
  
  
• Contributing to the continuous refinement of our detection models through informed feedback

This combination of human judgment and technological reach enables our team to detect legal violations and identify potential legal paths to pursue them. Our analysts are central to the legal intelligence process, turning complex data into actionable insights that help plaintiff attorneys build stronger, more compelling cases.

The Future of Legal Intelligence

We’re continuously expanding our Legal Intelligence Assets into new domains, improving our ability to detect misconduct, support litigation, and help plaintiff firms build strong cases. As corporate behavior becomes more opaque and public data grows, this capability is increasingly important.

Just as intelligence is central to national security, it’s become essential in law, too. Traditional discovery can’t keep up with the scale and complexity of today’s violations. Darrow is building the infrastructure for a new justice system built on early violation detection and systematic resolution.

This Might Interest You:‍

• What is Legal Intelligence: The Missing Piece in the Legal Ecosystem
• Building Stronger Greenwashing Class Actions with Climate Intelligence