CASE STUDIES
Nine Cases. Nine Real Legal Problems.
The nine cases documented here are not hypotheticals. Each was constructed from realistic fact patterns drawn from actual litigation categories — the kind of cases that arrive at law firm partners’ desks, sit in litigation funders’ pipelines, and keep corporate general counsel awake at night.
Across the nine cases, Lawgame ran multiple rounds of adversarial simulation — argument, counter-argument, judicial ruling — iterating until a dominant strategy emerged or every available path was exhausted. The cases span three legal domains: commercial litigation between sophisticated parties, regulatory enforcement by the state against private actors, and appellate strategy where the factual record is fixed and only argument remains.
Seven ended in strategic wins. One ended in an honest, autonomous recommendation not to litigate — itself a form of strategic intelligence that saved millions in futile proceedings. One produced a partial win through bifurcation that materially altered the settlement calculus.
Documented value across all nine cases: over $1 billion in preserved client value, avoided penalties, and overturned verdicts.
What Each Case Study Contains
Each case study page documents:
- The situation — what was at stake, who the parties were, what the legal theory looked like coming in
- The simulation — how many rounds were run, what failed, what the judicial reasoning revealed, whether an orbit transition occurred
- The dominant strategy — what Lawgame identified as the optimal move and why conventional analysis had missed it
- The Innovation Lab output — the asymmetric strategies generated for that case, their feasibility assessment, and which were deployed
- The outcome — the result of the simulation and, where applicable, the estimated value of the strategic insight
Each case is self-contained. You can read one or all nine. There is no required order — though readers new to Lawgame may find Case 2.2 (The Materiality Trap) the clearest illustration of the system’s core capability, and Case 2.1 (The Transparency Trap) the most instructive account of what an honest failure looks like.
The Nine Cases
Domain 1: Commercial Litigation & Complex Civil Disputes
These are information-rich environments where both sides are well-resourced and the asymmetry lies in strategic imagination rather than sophistication. Lawgame’s advantage here lies in identifying the optimal configuration of existing law and facts — the right frame, not new law.
| Case | What Was at Stake | Key Strategic Move | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Statutory Pre-emption as Logical Annihilation | £100M+ commercial IP dispute | Section 50B pre-emption retroactively deletes the tort’s core element | Win — 4 rounds |
| 1.2 | Procedural Flanking in a Patent Dispute | $500M+ standard-essential patent licensing | Rule 26(d) expedited discovery substitutes for unobtainable injunction | Win — 8 rounds, 2 orbits |
| 1.3 | Microeconomics Meets Class Certification | $50M+ AI product labelling class action | Marginal consumer price-setting theory converts certification obstacle into asset | Win — 5 rounds |
Domain 2: Regulatory Enforcement Defence
These are power-imbalanced disputes. The government brings institutional resources and catastrophic downside risk; conventional defence is overwhelmingly oriented toward settlement. Lawgame’s contribution was identifying the moments where that calculus is structurally wrong.
| Case | What Was at Stake | Key Strategic Move | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | The Transparency Trap | FCA enforcement against DeFi protocol founder | System identifies no winning defence exists — recommends not litigating | Strategic loss — 12 rounds, value in honest assessment |
| 2.2 | The Materiality Trap | $200M+ False Claims Act prosecution | Government’s own payment record defeats its materiality theory under Escobar | Win — 4 rounds |
| 2.3 | Bifurcation as Settlement Lever | SEC securities fraud over token sale | Rule 42(b) bifurcation removes prejudicial investor loss evidence from liability phase | Win — 8 rounds |
Domain 3: Appellate Strategy
At the appellate level, facts are fixed. Success requires persuading the court that the lower court applied the wrong legal framework or committed fundamental error. This is doctrinal engineering — and the domain where the Innovation Lab’s capacity for ontological reframing and logical annihilation proved most decisive.
| Case | What Was at Stake | Key Strategic Move | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Statutory Redundancy as Appellate Weapon | £100M trademark dispute, point of general public importance | Sections 3(6) and 46 create statutory redundancy, opening appeal permission path | Win — 7 rounds |
| 3.2 | Circuit Split to Certiorari in One Move | $15B litigation funding industry | Unambiguous circuit split + Erie doctrine defect identified in a single round | Win — 1 round |
| 3.3 | Legal Sufficiency as Guaranteed Reversal | $45M jury verdict | Expert testimony analytical gap renders verdict legally insufficient — de novo review secured | Win — 1 round |
When the Dominant Strategy is to Do Nothing
Case 2.1 deserves particular attention. After twelve rounds of adversarial simulation across multiple orbits — testing autonomy defences, jurisdictional challenges, and constitutional arguments — Lawgame autonomously concluded that no winning strategy existed on these facts. It recommended not litigating.
This is one of the system’s most valuable capabilities. Knowing when not to fight — and knowing it quickly, cheaply, and without the cognitive bias that leads human teams to pursue unwinnable positions they have already invested in — is itself strategic intelligence. Case 2.1 saved the client millions in futile proceedings and preserved resources for a non-adversarial regulatory engagement that had a genuine prospect of success.
An honest assessment of an unwinnable case is worth more than a confident assessment of a losing strategy.