March 14, 2025
Posted by: OFT Food Safety & Injury Lawyers
Long before becoming a big firm lawyer focusing on high stakes litigation in intellectual property and medical malpractice defense, and long before founding a boutique personal injury firm focused on helping people injured by contaminated food, OFT Law partner Bart Torvik had a deep passion for the Wisconsin Badgers and college basketball. The skills that made him a great lawyer—a keen analytical mind and a knack for common-sense problem solving—never translated to his pure sports fandom. Until they did.
As recounted in a recent USA Today profile of the “brains behind” the NCAA’s Selection Sunday process, Bart began creating a sophisticated statistical model to assess college basketball teams and players in 2014. The results of his “hobby”— a true passion project fueled not by profit but rather curiosity—proved invaluable to teams, coaches, gamblers, and hard-core fans.
Now, the NCAA uses Bart’s model as a component of their selection and seeding process.
As the USA Today article put it:
Torvik’s website generated three million pageviews last March, and Alabama coach Nate Oats mentioned him by name at a Final Four news conference. The website almost crashed on Selection Sunday the past two years. Unlike other popular college basketball metrics, Torvik neither charges money to subscribe to his website nor does he have corporate owners. He bought the server that runs the entire operation off Amazon.
The official acceptance of the NCAA this year is an honor, Torvik said, but brings with it a new level of scrutiny and spotlight. Every team’s “T-rank” really matters now.
Asked how his success in the world of advanced basketball metrics dovetails with his work as a trial lawyer, Bart said,
I try to bring the dispassionate analysis of probabilities and numbers I’ve used for years in developing T-Rank to areas of the law that are often fraught with emotions. As a trial lawyer for injured people, I take pride in helping regular people truly understand complexity and probabilities at a time when my clients are making difficult decisions at some of their darkest, most difficult moments.
Basketball statistics are truly fun for me. Advising clients on the value of their cases—trying to put a likely dollar figure on a death or a life-changing illness—is obviously a much more serious and important exercise. But there is a common thread in the ability to set aside passions and use objective analysis to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a case (or team). That is something I think I excel at.
Bart and his team at OFT Law continue to represent people injured in large nationwide outbreaks, including the recent Boar’s Head Listeria outbreak and the McDonald’s E. coli outbreak linked to onions produced at Taylor Farms.
