Robert Ambrogi Blog
The litigation analytics company Lex Machina has completed what it describes as a milestone expansion of its data set of court documents, adding another 500,000 federal district court cases so that it now has full coverage of virtually every civil case filed in federal district courts anywhere in the United States.
The only civil cases it does not include are prisoner petitions, which the company deemed not commercially relevant to its customer base of law firms and corporations.
Until now, Lex Machina’s analytics have been focused on specific, major practice areas (currently 22 practice areas), and in its collection and tagging of federal cases, it prioritized those practice areas. But with this latest expansion, it has added the remaining 15% of district court cases that did not fit under one of those major practice areas.
“This is a pretty big milestone in terms of our overall expansion to cover all civil litigation in federal district court,” Carla Rydholm, general manager and head of product at Lex Machina, told me during a briefing this week. “Now we have the ability to provide coverage of every commercially relevant case.”
Before this update, some analytics showed a grey area for the 15% of cases not accounted for. Now, the analytics give a full picture.
While analytics by practice area remain the primary focus of the platform, it now allows users to compare analytics across all federal cases, without having to select a case type, and then drill down into more granular data based on courts, judges, counsel, parties, and other filters.
In addition to tagging cases based on the 22 primary practice areas, Lex Machina has now added tagging for another five categories: admiralty/maritime, forfeiture/penalty, FOIA, immigration, and RICO.
Cases that do not fit within any of these practice areas will be tagged as uncategorized, but users will be able to view the federal nature-of-suit code that was applied to the original filing.
Where comparisons previously could be done only within a practice area, they can now be done across all cases.
This enhanced data set is also available through the litigation analytics feature of the legal research platform Lexis+. Lex Machina is owned by LexisNexis.
The significance of this is that users will get a truly complete picture of federal court analytics that encompass not just the 85% of cases previously covered but 100% of cases. That means that when they are exploring analytics for factors such as outcomes, damages, or remedies, they are getting the comprehensive view.
Key to Lex Machina’s analytics is how the company processes the raw case data after collection — cleaning, tagging, coding and enhancing the data so that it can be analyzed across a number of parameters.
It allows users to explore analytics based on entities — judges, courts, law firms, attorneys and parties — and by outcomes — case resolutions, timing, damages, findings, remedies and motion metrics.
Lex Machina evolved out of a research project launched in 2006 at Stanford Law School to collect and analyze data on patent cases. Since its acquisition by LexisNexis in 2015, it has steadily added more practice areas, expanded into state courts, added analytics for federal courts of appeal, and added Litigation Footprint for visualizing litigation.
With this latest traunch of cases, Lex Machina can now provide these outcome-driven analytics, including damages and case resolutions, for over 3.7 million federal district civil cases, based on data from 17.5 million documents.
Along with this release, Lex Machina has updated certain tools and added new capabilities that it says will allow for more depth, detail, and nuance. A new “Custom Columns” feature streamlines the creation, sharing, and export of customized reports, it says, while a new “Findings Search” feature allows users to search findings within a specific practice area for findings that are most relevant to their own case and practice.