Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, has announced the addition of almost 800,000 civil cases to ts federal district court coverage. According to the press release  this “gives users access to all commercially relevant federal civil cases in one place.”  Lex Machina had  previously grown its market share, segment by segment starting with the launch of the first Patent analytics module in 2010. There are now 16 practice modules covering  2 million cases. This is the first time they have made a  “non-topical” expansion of the database. All of the modules offer analytics about judges, law firms, attorneys, parties and districts as well as specialized analytics  for specific issues. 

 “With the addition of nearly 800,000 cases, Lex Machina is taking a major step forward in our mission to bring Legal Analytics to all areas of the law,” said Karl Harris, CEO of Lex Machina, “This is the most cases we’ve ever added to our system at one time, giving users new capabilities and insights into the entire court system.”  The new tranche of  nearly 800,000  offers new insights into a broader range of issues. The proprietary Lex Machina systems, including its Attorney Data Engine and Motion Metrics, analyse  all  the cases in the Lex Machina platform and  drive the additional insights with the expanded coverage. Enhanced capabilities include:   Continue Reading Lex Machina Launches Enterprise Platform Offering and Webinar Today

Casetext has released a study examining the efficiencies delivered by its new motion drafting platform Compose. Compose was announced this year at Legal Tech in New York. The product which I reviewed back in February enables a lawyer to select a motion types in specific jurisdictions, add arguments from a menu for the jurisdiction, select legal standards customized to the arguments and jurisdiction, add facts and authorities using the powerful Parallel Search technology and then customize the draft. The report is called “Increasing Law Firm Profitability using Compose Brief-Drafting technology” and is available at this link.

ROI Benefits of Casetext Compose

The study. Participants had never used Compose before. They were shown a 4 minute video and then asked to use the platform to draft a motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction based on a complex set of facts. The study included 13 litigators at AmLaw200 firms and/or federal clerkship experience.Each participant was asked to provide an estimate of how long the assignment would take using their normal research process. They were given two hours to complete a draft the brief using Compose. Although two of the 13 could not complete the assignment in two hours the results were still impressive. Using Based on each lawyers estimate using Compose on average the group was 76% faster, saved 5.2 hours per brief and 92% of the lawyers reported reduced risk of missing an argument or a relevant case.

The report also explores the strategic and financial benefits  of Compose in terms of reducing write-offs, increasing the profitability of flat fee engagements, and reducing risk.

Kudos to Casetext  I have been begging vendors to measure the impact of their products. We all know that no study is perfect, but workflow studies do at least capture snapshots of experience which can be used in the product evaluation and justification process during procurement. At the end of the day if the product does not deliver actual efficiencies it will not survive the next budget round. I have repeatedly begged the largest vendors Lexis, Westlaw, Wolters Kluwer  and Bloomberg Law to produce ROI studies and I get a lecture on how complicated it is. Well now we have seen two small companies PacerPro (with Fireman & Company) and Casetext  release studies this summer which attempt to take on he admittedly gnarly challenge of measuring the  efficiency and ROI delivered by their product. Time for this to become an industry standard. The competition for budget money is intensifying and vendors need to start bringing their ROI to the negotiation table.

Here is a link to the Casetext Compose ROI report

PacerPro launched in 2014 with a simple overlay to the pacer system. In enabled firms to streamline the distribution of thousands of pacer filings to litigation teams and lower Their Pacer costs.  Cofounders Gavin McGrane, CEO and Anna McGrane, CoO have continued to expand the service and to explore how PacerPro can  be leveraged to integrate federal court data with knowledge and business systems in law firms.  Pacer dockets are full data points on judges, nature of suit, attorneys which can be tagged and linked to internal systems.The white paper includes and case study integrating this data to documents in a firm’s DMS system.

The McGranes worked with Fireman & Company  on a white paper “Knowledge Management with PacerPro.” which examines the benefits of PacerPro in streamlining workflow and driving new insights. Before PacerPro the routine distribution of Pacer documents related to a clients litigation, involved a 10 step process of clicking, labeling,saving and distributing. Worst of all, the same process might be duplicated across the team. And with all this clicking and saving, documents still might be missed… creating a malpractice risk.

The report includes case studies from 18 law firms and documents the benefits of PacerPro. The white paper is full of testimonials from law firm processionals who have implemented PacerPro. The report estimated that those firms received over 3 million PDFtoGo emails (replacing the manual processing) which represent 48,757 hours of time saved across those firms. 

 Firms participating in the white paper include: Baker Botts LLP; Barack Ferrazzano Kirschbaum & Nagelberg LLP; DLA Piper LLP (US); Durie Tangri LLP; Husch Blackwell LLP; Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP; Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick P.L.L.C.; Kramer, Levin, Naftalis & Frankel LLP; Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie LLP; McKool Smith P.C.; Morrison & Foerster LLP; Reed Smith LLP; Richards, Layton & Finger, PA; Shook, Hardy & Bacon L.L.P., Steptoe & Johnson PLLC; Susman Godfrey LLP; Winston & Strawn LLP; Shearman & Sterling LLP. 

The report is available at no cost at PacerPro and at Fireman. 

If you have been watching the robust marketplace for patent practice products you will surely wonder “Could anyone come up with a new idea for a patent product?”  Well yes. Petition.ai has focused on a very narrow area of patent law where there has been no coverage… and they own the space…….. Petition.ai has  identified a “niche of need” helping lawyers search and compare patent examination petitions. Founder Michael Spector describes it as “haystack of needles”  otherwise difficult to find.

 

Here’s what I learned talking to the founder of petition.ai. Every year over 300,000 patent applications are filed in the United States Patent Office. About 15% of those applications require a change after filing or about 40,000 petitions. These petitions range from the mundane – request to accelerate examination to the career saving  – reversing an accidental abandonment of a patent by clicking the wrong box or accidentally disclosing confidential information.  Until now, lawyers might have to rely on their firm’s DMS to find a similar petition, but there was no easily searchable public or commercial source available for the PTO Office of Petitions filings and examiners rulings.

Use Cases Petition.ai currently includes 500,00 petitions going back to 2016. Here are some ways that Petition.ai can be used:

  • Find a model of petition on the same issue that has been granted. Provides links to PDFs of documents.
  • Get valuable intelligence on the specific petition examiner who will be reviewing your petition. Contact examiner in advance to ask drafting and timing issues.
  • Manage client expectations regarding history of similar petitions.
  • Analytics are still being developed but currently include: grant/denial rate for specific issues, grant/denial rate by law firm.

Pricing – the product is priced based on the number of patents filed by the firm in the prior year.. It is really smart to avoid basing cost on the number of attorneys and instead focus on the metric of need. Price is based on the number of patents filed by the firm in the prior year and assumes that each firm needs access to petitions for 15% of their applications. Price per firm ranges from $500 – $7,500 a year.

Future Developments will include adding  time to grant analytics and expanding the database retroactively.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Register now for the live webcast: All Federal Cases – All Available Practice Areas – All in One Place!

Join Karl Harris, CEO of Lex Machina, who will interview Wade Malone, Co-Head of Product at Lex Machina, Greg Lambert, Chief Knowledge Services Officer at Jackson Walker, and Jean O’Grady, Sr. Director of Research & Knowledge at DLA Piper, on July 30, for a 45 minute live webcast at 9:00 am PDT (12:00 pm EDT), discussing the benefits of deploying Legal Analytics across different practice areas in your organization. Register here.

Lex Machina has traditionally expanded our Legal Analytics coverage by rolling out new practice areas. Now we’re expanding our coverage in a new way: You can get access to all commercially relevant civil cases in PACER, across all available practice areas, for the most comprehensive federal district court coverage ever offered.

Today Trellis,an AI powered state court analytics platform is announcing expanded coverage to trial courts throughout New York Florida and Texas. Trellis launched a California database in in March 2018 with $2 M seed funding. The legal market has clearly responded to the marketplace of analytics products which have sprung up over the past five years. State court coverage remains a challenge. The thing that appears to make Trellis different is that it collects not only data but documents from all the courts it covers. It offers an analytics dashboard and a motion library.

In a recent article in Techlaw Crossroads , Trellis Founder and CEO  Nicole   Clark is quoted as saying “we want Trellis to be the Google of state court trial court analytics. It enables lawyer to search across all of the documents.” Like other analytics products Trellis data can be used to develop litigation strategy, pitch strategy, assess opponents litigation history as well as a judge’s motion history.

Trellis leaders have made an interesting strategic decision. Since they will focus only on state cases not federal cases they limiting their archival coverage and building forward. The rationale is that state court judges tend to have shorter terms on the bench since they are not appointed for life.  This limited history may work for judges, but it will be helpful to have a deeper archive for  law firm, party  and motion data.  I could not find coverage dates for each court on the Trellis website.

Alon Schwartz co-founder and CPO of Trellis is quoted in the press release  stating that they “use multi layered classification algorithms to seamlessly surface the most meaningful information to the user.”

New York, Florida and Texas. They are offering 2 million cases across 28 New York State Counties including counties of New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area.They have 3.5 million cases from Florida and I counted 58 counties in their press release. I counted 36 counties in Texas which the press release says includes 3 million cases.

The Trellis Dashboard

Research Features:

Trellis supports multi state research on opposing counsel and other parties.

The platform allows you to compare judges motion grants compared to the county and the state.

Motion Library included which provides examples of  motions as well as state courts judges ruling on those motions.

Cases can be filtered by parties council court or matter type.

Free Trial Trellis is offering a two week free trial. Trellis is an interesting addition to the state court analytics landscape, I will be keeping my eye out for new developments.

 

 

Today Fastcase and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft are announcing a partnership which will enhance the content available to “Cadwalader Cabinet” subscribers. The “Cadwalader Cabinet “is an integrated legal research and intelligence service for financial services lawyers and compliance professionals. It provides news, workflow tools and a collection of over 250,000 documents. It was created over a decade ago to provide market-leading regulatory expertise to financial institutions, regulators, academics, and law firms. The 17,000 subscribers to the Cabinet newsletter and platform will have access to additional primary law content and alerts including access to cases from the Fastcase platform. 

According to the press release, Cabinet content includes financial statutes and regulatory materials as well as commentary “provided by lawyers at Cadwalader, one of the oldest and most well-respected U.S. law firms.”   A video illustrating how the Cadwalader Cabinet works can  be viewed at this link.

More from the Press Release: 

“This partnership has been in development for a while, but it is particularly powerful moment for us to be providing this additional resource to our users, who may not have the full use of their ordinary resources as they or their colleagues work from home,” said Steven Lofchie, a Cadwalader partner and founder of the Cabinet. “The additional materials that we are able to provide through Fastcase will take Cabinet users to the next level by providing a complete set of the materials to which they need 24/7 access.”  

 Fastcase VP of Product Nina Steinbrecker Jack notes: “Cadwalader and particularly the Cadwalader Cabinet has been a market leader at adding intelligent solutions to organize and deliver legal analysis from experts at the firm to the firm’s clients, an initiative that Fastcase is eager to support. Firms are often surprised to learn that Fastcase welcomes the opportunity to customize solutions that simplify the process of integrating primary law and keeping it up to date. Our conversations with recognized innovators like Steven Lofchie at law firms always lead to creative ways to collaborate and improve their services to clients.” 

 Building solutions directly within a firm’s products and platforms continues the extension of Fastcase to democratize the law.   

“Data-driven law firms are beginning to create a new generation of legal services for clients, and Cadwalader Cabinet is a terrific example of what that future will hold,” said Ed Walters, Fastcase CEO. “Law firms contain enormous expertise and information assets, and the firms that can harness that expertise for the benefit of clients will be true leaders in a fast-changing time.” 

From Treatise to Client-Centric Platform. I remember more than a decade ago when Cadwalader partner Steven Lofchie’s treatise on broker dealer regulation disappeared from a now defunct digital platform called “Books on Screen”– to the great disappointment of many broker-dealer practitioners. It is interesting to learn that Lofchie  has been a driving force behind a new kind of interactive client-centric research platform– now partnering with Fastcase a leading disruptor in the legal information market.

Today Lexis is announcing Lexis is launching a significant new platform called Lexis + . I had a call with Jeff Pfeifer,   chief product officer at LexisNexis and David Ganote senior director of product strategy at Lexis Nexis. Lexis+  is being positioned as a premium solution which has been in development over the last 18 months.  Pfeifer described the release as improving the user experience and delivering insights though integration across all elements of the platform. There are a total of 11 new features which will only be available in Lexis+:

  1. Updated, Modern User Interface visual styling including a new Experience Dock to navigate to integrated elements of the product​
  2. Practical Guidance content fully integrated in “Search All​” experience of Legal Research
  3. Lexis Practice Advisor application also fully integrated in Lexis+ and all subscribers will have access to at least one module of practical guidance content
  4. Brief Analysis
  5. Expanded Search Term Maps, now covering 35 Content Types
  6. ​Enhanced Ravel View, including new ‘anchor’ capabilities to better navigate the visual map
  7. Shepard’s At Risk
  8. Code Compare
  9. Lexis Answers, fully redesigned in Lexis+
  10. Missing & Must Include​
  11. Search Tree

One of the most fascinating aspects of the new platform is rebuild of the Lexis Answers feature. According to Pfeifer the newest version of Lexis Answers was built at Lexis Labs where the team worked with a machine learning technology from Google  referred to as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). BERT was smart but not smart enough to master the complexities of legal concepts and the idiosyncrasies of legal writing and syntax. According to Pfeifer “Lexis sent BERT to law school.” Lexis was able to train BERT using the Lexis taxonomy and headnotes which had been developed at Lexis decades ago. Yet another example of human machine collaboration. 

The Insight Wave. The signature visual identity is called the “insight wave” a net-like swath of color which arcs and turns across the screen. According to Pfeifer,  the  new image represents the flow and inter-connected-ness of information. This is appropriate since the new platform offers a  tighter integration of research, analytics and practical guidance tools.

Voluntary upgrade. I’m going to cut to the chase for my librarian and knowledge management colleagues. Lexis Advance is not being phased out. Subscribers can continue to purchase Lexis Advance or choose to upgrade to Lexis+.

The Dashboard. The main Lexis dashboard includes an “experience dock” on the left side of the screen which allows users to select between legal research, practical guidance or brief analysis. 

 “What would you like to research today?”  hovers over the prominent search bar. The single search feature will search across all Lexis content. Users can enter queries using natural language or Boolean.

Lexis Answers in Lexis+ was developed from the ground up.  Today, it answers from questions from caselaw but the Continue Reading Lexis Rides the “Insight Wave:” Launches  Lexis+ with New Look, Brief Analyzer, AI Search, Codes Compare and Loads of New Features

Tax lawyers want it all. And the more granular and up-to date the better. Today  Wolters Kluwer  Legal and Regulatory released a new alerts feature in digital Tax Reporters Plus Suite on Cheetah that will enable tax lawyers to track alerts for changes in the tax code, regulations, explanations and other code related documents.

Alerts in a Time of COVID

New legislation is always followed by a raft of regulations and administrative materials.Since the passage of the CARES Act PL 116-123 and the Families First Act PL 116-127 in response to the COVID pandemic tax lawyers have been on high alert monitoring the implementing regulations and interpretive materials.

With the Tax Reporters Plus Suite’s new Alerts feature, users can set alerts to monitor tax code sections they are Continue Reading Tax Law Alerts in a Time of COVID — Wolters Kluwer Cheetah Adds Powerful New Tracking Tool

Full Court Press, the Fastcase imprint  is launching a webinar series in conjunction with legal history publishers TwelveTables Press. “Leaders in Law” is a monthly webinar series featuring interviews with notable attorney involved in civil rights in the U.S. and around the world.

“There’s no better time to hear from those who fight the civil rights fight and have taken these legal steps before us,” noted Twelve Tables Press Publisher and Fastcase COO, Steve Errick.

 The first live webinar in the series focuses on a seminar LGBT rights case. The Legacy of Lawrence v. Texas, is Continue Reading Fastcase Launches “Leaders in Law” Webinar Series Focused on Lawyers in Civil Rights