Sacramento County Superior Court and Clark County (Las Vegas) District Court are the next new state court offerings; with the addition of these two modules, the state court cases covered by Lex Machina increases by 171,480 to a total of 1,126,722.
Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, announced an exciting expansion of the company’s state court analytics. Consisting of more than 170,000 combined civil court cases in Sacramento County Superior Court and Clark County (Las Vegas) District Court, the new modules give practitioners critical insights about judges, courts, law firms, individual attorneys and parties in these 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 continue to 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. The two new state courts – Sacramento County Superior Court (88,000+ cases) and Clark County (Las Vegas) District Court (82,000+ cases) – each have their own data collection infrastructure and nuances. These modules, and thus the substantial case numbers, cover four years of court activity beginning with cases filed January 1, 2016 or later.
The Sacramento and Clark County courts were selected for the next module expansions because they represent important data sets in the universe of state court analytics. The vast majority of cases in the United States are litigated in state courts, and Sacramento County Superior Court is an important venue for California state litigation. This court is located in the California State Capitol and is a key court for civil cases involving government entities and businesses.
Clark County District Court is the largest general jurisdiction court in Nevada, serving more than 2.1 million citizens in the Las Vegas area. It encompasses all municipalities and outlying communities of Clark County. Lex Machina’s expansion into a third state is an exciting milestone in accomplishing the company’s mission of bringing legal analytics to all areas of the law.
Lex Machina developed relationships with these two courts and was able to gather feedback from users practicing in Sacramento and Clark County. Lex Machina plans to continue expanding its state court coverage to a dozen U.S. state courts by the end of 2020, including additional metropolitan areas in Northern, Central, and Southern California.
“What’s really groundbreaking about our ongoing expansion into state courts is the depth to which we are delving into the documents and data” said Karl Harris, Lex Machina’s CEO. ”We are not only obtaining documents from notoriously inconvenient state court docket systems, but we are combining that with our cutting-edge technology from our natural language processing team to produce a set of legal analytics that is not available anywhere else.”
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 these new state court modules continues Lex Machina’s expansion into state law analytics. Lex Machina has previously released modules for the Delaware Court of Chancery, Los Angeles County Superior Court and the Houston Area (including Harris County District Court, Harris County Court, Fort Bend County District Court, and Fort Bend County Court). San Bernardino County Superior Court is slated for release next week on June 9th.
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.
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, 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.
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