Lex Machina is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the launch of new state court analytics modules offering data on more than 870,000 cases. The new modules cover Los Angeles County California (615,000 cases) and Harris District and County court in Texas (combined 255,000 cases). The developers have maintained the look and feel of the Lex Machina federal modules and offer analytics insights into judges, courts, law firms and individual attorneys. The data covers four years of court data starting with January 1, 2016.

The Lex Machina state court features:
● Searching by judge, law firm, attorney name or party
● Timing analytics, trial resolutions, trial damages and trial rulings
● Keyword searching within docket entry text and downloaded documents
● Viewing analytics across all state courts or in one particular court
● Court-specific filters, such as case types and case tags

Building a state analytics product is Hard. The market has been impatient for state analytics – but I understand the hold up. Pacer data which underpins all of the federal analytics products is relatively “clean” and consistent compared to state court data. Even within a single  state, each court can vary in the types of data it collects or the types of documents it makes available online. I spoke with Carla Rydholm, Director of Product Management to get a better understanding of how the product development team addressed these challenges. Lex Machina leveraged its Attorney Data Engine and other natural language processing technology to tackle each new state court. Nonetheless, for each state court system the product development team had to get “under the hood” to understand the idiosyncrasies of  docket system and data collection practices.

The three new state courts – Los Angeles County Superior Court (615,000+ cases), Harris County District Court (175,000+ cases) and Harris County Court (80,000+ cases) – each have their own data collection infrastructure and nuances. The LA county dockets do not provide  judge information and the Harris county and district courts do not provide law firm information. The engineering team had to extract data from documents when an important data element such as an attorney or law firm name, did not appear in the structured docket data. The document-reading technology Lex Machina  was retrained to recognize text in state court documents. While the team was leveraging the existing Lex Machina technologies, Rydholm described the engineering and development team as operating “in start up mode” as they faced new challenges and had to experiment with new ways of optimizing internal tagging. The natural language processing team developed what they refer to as “canonical” lists of judges to enhance the reliability of judges data.

Karl Harris, Lex Machina’s CEO is quoted in the press release: “It’s an exciting technical challenge to responsibly expand our coverage to include complex analytics for state courts, where even basic information such as who was involved in the case is buried in millions of pages of court documents. Electronic filing systems across states and districts are unique to individual courts, so structuring and normalizing the data to make it usable and reliable is notoriously difficult.”

Lex Machina Court Specific Filters

Data Normalization Challenge.  While Lex Machina claims they have mastered normalization of judges names, they still need to develop canonical lists of company names. Researchers are given the opportunity to select from a list of  which may include simple name variation such as IBM or International Business Machines as well as a list of subsidiaries or affiliates. Large companies like “Apple” produces a  v-e-r-y long list of  possible subsidiaries and name variations. I know that Lexis Nexis owns some of the best public record data sources on the market – these resources need to leveraged to cluster and highlight the names of related entities and flag or segregate company names that are not related (e.g. Apple Bank) to make the selection process easier for users.

Lex Machina Trial Resolution Data

Competition. The start-up Gavelytics was the first company to tackle California courts. One of their unique offerings is the analysis of 170.6 preemptions of California judge. Lex Machina has collected pre-motion data but does not yet have a report on 170.6 challenges. In 2018 Thomson Reuters offered state court analytics on Westlaw Edge including California and Texas.

What’s Next? They plan to expand to 10-13 new major county courts including New York over the next year.

State Law Analytics at Legalweek: Expanding the Legal Analytics Footprint
On Tuesday, February 4 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the Rhinelander Theater (2nd floor), Karl Harris, CEO, Lex Machina will join Eric J. Felsberg, Principal, Jackson Lewis; Catherine A. Bernard, US Litigation Professional Support Lawyer, Mayer Brown; and Angela Ni, Director of Underwriting and Data Science Strategies, Corporate Counsel, Parabellum Capital to discuss how Legal Analytics is transforming the full litigation cycle from new client acquisition all the way through trial. They will explore the key factors leading the expansion of analytics in today’s data-driven environment, how lawyers are leveraging analytics to make their practices more competitive and the challenges of bringing comprehensive analytics to state court litigation data.

Here is the full press release:

.Lex Machina Launches State Law Modules, Extending Its Groundbreaking Legal Analytics to State Courts in California and Texas

Los Angeles County Superior Court, Harris County Court and Harris County District Court are the first new offerings; extensive new features for state courts include entity and document searching

Menlo Park, CA — February 4, 2020 — Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of its award-winning Legal Analytics® platform, Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, today announced an exciting new expansion into state court analytics. Consisting of more than 870,000 cases in Los Angeles County and Harris County (Houston metro area), the new modules give practitioners critical insights about judges, courts, law firms, individual attorneys and parties in state courts. By leveraging its Attorney Data Engine and other natural language processing technology, Lex Machina is the only legal analytics provider able to utilize state court documents to provide comprehensive coverage about the behavior of judges, law firms, attorneys, and parties in state courts.

Lex Machina is solving an immense technical challenge by taking complex, unstructured data and utilizing its software to allow practitioners to make data-driven decisions, develop winning case strategies and win new business in brand new state court venues. Because there is no unified system for state courts analogous to PACER in federal courts, Lex Machina will add its new State Court modules on a court-by-court basis, with an emphasis on strict data quality and integrity to ensure that legal professionals have access to the most complete, comprehensive and accurate analytics available.

Lex Machina worked closely with the court systems to understand their docketing practices and create analytics that reflect the unique aspects of individual courts. For example, the three new state courts – Los Angeles County Superior Court (615,000+ cases), Harris County District Court (175,000+ cases) and Harris County Court (80,000+ cases) – each have their own data collection infrastructure and nuances. The new modules, and thus the substantial case numbers, cover four years of court activity beginning with cases filed January 1, 2016 or later.

The Los Angeles and Houston courts were selected for the initial release because they represent important data sets to understand the overall process of developing state court analytics. Los Angeles County Superior Court is the largest state court in the nation by volume. Harris County encompasses a large metropolitan area and is part of Texas’ two-court civil system with the Harris County District Court of general jurisdiction and Harris County Court of limited jurisdiction. Lex Machina developed relationships with these three courts and was able to gather feedback from users practicing in Los Angeles and Houston. Lex Machina plans to expand its state court coverage to a dozen U.S. state courts in 2020, including many major metropolitan areas.

 

“It’s an exciting technical challenge to responsibly expand our coverage to include complex analytics for state courts, where even basic information such as who was involved in the case is buried in millions of pages of court documents. Electronic filing systems across states and districts are unique to individual courts, so structuring and normalizing the data to make it usable and reliable is notoriously difficult,” said Karl Harris, Lex Machina’s CEO. “In spite of these obstacles, we’ve now laid the foundation to bring Legal Analytics to state courts all over the country, and customers familiar with our interface for federal courts will see that our state court modules work similarly. This is an incredible accomplishment.”

 

Lex Machina gathers raw information from state court cases, including downloading millions of state court documents to present the most comprehensive and accurate data possible. The company cleans, tags, codes, enhances and presents the resulting data in a way that makes it easy for users to quickly access insights and grasp trends that are relevant to the legal matter they’re working on. Whether simply searching for a case or looking for more in-depth analytics, practitioners can investigate a party’s litigation track record, assess a law firm’s experience in similar cases, observe patterns in judicial decisions, examine the range of damages awarded at trial or search docket entry text.

 

Both new and existing Legal Analytics users will appreciate the easy-to-use interface that lets them access a wealth of new state court features including:

  • Searching by judge, law firm, attorney name or party
  • Timing analytics, trial resolutions, trial damages and trial rulings
  • Keyword searching within docket entry text and downloaded documents
  • Viewing analytics across all state courts or in one particular court
  • Court-specific filters, such as case types and case tags

 

The introduction of the new State Law modules complements Lex Machina’s first foray into state law analytics, the highly specialized Delaware Court of Chancery, which launched in January 2018. Over the past 10 years, Lex Machina has released modules for 15 federal practice areas, including antitrust, bankruptcy, consumer protection, contracts, copyright, employment, environmental, ERISA, insurance, patent, product liability, securities, tax, trademark, and trade secrets. It will continue to work on releasing new federal court practice areas as well as new state courts later this year.

 

State Law Analytics at Legalweek: Expanding the Legal Analytics Footprint

On Tuesday, February 4 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the Rhinelander Theater (2nd floor), Karl Harris, CEO, Lex Machina will join Eric J. Felsberg, Principal, Jackson Lewis; Catherine A. Bernard, US Litigation Professional Support Lawyer, Mayer Brown; and Angela Ni, Director of Underwriting and Data Science Strategies, Corporate Counsel, Parabellum Capital to discuss how Legal Analytics is transforming the full litigation cycle from new client acquisition all the way through trial. They will explore the key factors leading the expansion of analytics in today’s data-driven environment, how lawyers are leveraging analytics to make their practices more competitive and the challenges of bringing comprehensive analytics to state court litigation data.

 

About Lex Machina

Now celebrating the 10th anniversary of Legal Analytics, the Lex Machina platform fundamentally changes how companies and law firms compete in the business and practice of law. The company provides strategic insights on judges, lawyers, law firms, parties and other critical information across 15 federal practice areas, the Delaware Court of Chancery and select state courts. This allows law firms and companies to predict the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce, enabling them to win cases and close business.

 

Legal Analytics was named “Best Legal Analytics” (The Recorder, 2014, 2015, 2016), “Best New Product of the Year” (American Association of Law Libraries, 2015), a “Legal A.I. Leader” (The National Law Journal, 2018), “Best Decision Management Solution” (AI Breakthrough Awards, 2019), and “Disruptor of the Year” (Changing Lawyer Awards, 2019). Based in Silicon Valley, Lex Machina is part of LexisNexis, a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics. For more information, please visit www.lexmachina.com.