Abstract
A method for estimating an opposing party's cumulative legal spend in a pending civil matter by counting observable case activity signals drawn from the public court docket and extrapolating projected spend from the activity density relative to case age. The method does not require access to the opposing party's billing records, retainer disclosures, or internal financial data. Counted signals include outbound correspondence logged in the docket, inbound legal responses, attorney appearance records, substantive motion filings, and hearing entries. A per-signal cost weight is derived from jurisdictional attorney fee averages, then multiplied by the observed signal counts and scaled by case age to produce a projected total defense cost used as an input to a bilateral settlement threshold calculation.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Burton, Aaron, "Docket Activity Density Signals for Estimating Opposing Party Legal Spend in Bilateral Settlement Analysis", Technical Disclosure Commons, (April 21, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/9860