- Jackson Lewis

About this practice

From minimizing legal risk to improving planning and decision-making, it is crucial that employers recognize the value in leveraging data as a management tool.

With decades of experience studying the interplay between data analytics and the law, our multidisciplinary team of lawyers, data scientists and statisticians use sophisticated analytical tools to advise clients in multiple practice areas. Our Data Analytics group provides data-driven compliance assessments, support during litigation and in strategic labor relations, and talent analytics for management and recruitment.

In all matters, we combine our legal knowledge with insights obtained from powerful analytical approaches to provide clients with critical information, while maximizing the protections afforded by the attorney-client privilege.

Talent Analytics

We combine our legal knowledge with proven analytical methods to add a layer of legal and statistical rigor to complex business decisions. Our talent analytics platform is built with accountable algorithms, as equitability under the law is seamlessly integrated into our algorithmic framework. All of our predictive algorithms are guided by extensive legal vetting to help the employer avoid selection and compensation decisions that may otherwise result in risk. Our Data Analytics group leverages employers’ rich workforce datasets to enable effective data-driven decisions for workforce-related issues. Some of our services include:

Talent Recruitment: Using cutting-edge machine learning models, we empower employers to make data-driven talent recruitment decisions. We provide:

Predictive models that identify attributes possessed by successful applicants
Automated applicant pool synthesis based on qualification similarity models

Talent Management: We build ensemble models to assess and reduce employee turnover and help employers develop data-driven retention plans. Our team offers:

Predictive models of attrition
- Ensemble attrition classification models
- Survival analysis
Workforce plans based on learned factors affecting employee attrition

Equity and Policy Assessments: We offer assessments of compensation and selection equity using rich internal and external datasets, provide rigorous data-driven and statistical assessments of policy impacts, and build models to predict the effectiveness of new policies. Our services include:

Assessing internal equity beyond race and gender differences
- Multiple regressions with automated feature selection
- Custom regression models for business-appropriate features
Determining market equity to align talent needs with budgetary constraints
- Web-scale market equitability assessments
Statistical assessments of policy decisions to determine if goals were obtained
Predictive models to assess whether new policy decisions will be successful

Compliance Assessment and Litigation Support

Statistical analysis is a key component of assessing an employer’s compliance with the law. With extensive experience devising and using complex analytical tools, we advise employers in a wide range of matters, including:

Litigation Support: Using proprietary algorithms, we can model employers’ exposure to a wide range of legal claims that involves a variety of issues, including, but not limited to, those involving overtime, leave entitlement, performance assessments, disciplinary records, minimum wage and tip credit calculations.

Compensation Policies: Our state-of-the-art modeling techniques assess employer compensation systems and identify risk areas with respect to government enforcement agencies and other potential litigants. Services we provide in this area include:

Forming defensible “pay groups” for analysis
Statistical assessments of gender-, race- and ethnicity-based compensation differences
- Asymptotic and exact tests for small samples
- Linear and non-linear multiple regression techniques
- Quantile, interval and constrained regressions
Model validation and specification tests
- Outlier detection
- Influential observation tests

Reorganizations/Selection Decisions: We customize and build statistical models that mirror employers’ selection processes to minimize liability stemming from employer selection decisions, including:

Construction of appropriate comparator pools
Statistical assessments of gender-, race- and ethnicity-based selection differences
- Conditional and unconditional exact testing
- Stratified Mantel-Haenszel tests
- Stratified proportional hazard models
- Logistic regression – unconditional, conditional and exact
- Multiple eligibilities and competing risks
Geospatial analysis to detect WARN-triggering events

Strategic labor relations

We have extensive experience supporting labor negotiations and implementing comprehensive preventive labor relations programs. Our services in this area include:

Calculating long-term costs of collectively bargained contracts
Ensuring compliance with the administration of collectively bargained compensation plans
Quantitatively assessing the efficacy of training programs

Data management

We rely on the use of efficient computing techniques to synthesize millions of records from myriad data sources. Data files in any format can be seamlessly transformed into files of analyzable format:

Convert native and scanned PDFs to analyzable text formats
Use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to process hard copies of data
Perform complicated merges between disparate data storage systems

We can work with your team

While we are ready to assist employers with all aspects of their analytics initiatives, our team also stands ready to work with employers’ existing in-house analytics teams to design data-driven solutions that comply with applicable workplace law. We offer sophisticated advice and counsel services regarding these solutions under the protections of the attorney-client privilege.