Lex Machina enhances state court offerings with new ability to retrieve court documents.
Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, takes state court analytics to a new level, driven by Lex Machina’s unique combination of natural language processing and human review of state documents, including new state court “fetch” functionality. This gives Lex Machina users two major advantages: 1) unprecedented Legal Analytics that can only be attained through analyzing state court documents and 2) access to comprehensive sets of these documents.
“Lex Machina targets key filings for use by our natural language processing team and attorney review team,” said Carla Rydholm, Director of Product Management. “We use these documents to create comprehensive analytics for entities like judges, counsel and parties, and high-value datasets such as trial rulings and damages. Then, we make these documents and analytics available to customers so that navigating from millions of cases to a single document can be done in a few clicks.”
Exclusive Analytics Capabilities
In the absence of a unified system for state courts, Lex Machina takes on the difficult work of understanding the individual docketing practice of each state court system, and creating accurate analytics that reflect the unique aspects of the individual courts.
Lex Machina systematically collects important documents for all of its state courts. These documents are then guided through the company’s proprietary system that combines natural language processing technology with attorney review to generate important insights into litigation outcomes. By going through this process, Lex Machina enhances the overall dataset by adding entities and outcomes that are not readily available from the court’s docketing system. The company has also created processes to polish judge data and ensure that every case has an accurate judge listing, rather than relying solely on docket information or metadata that may include out-of-date information. This creates the most accurate, complete, and transparent analytics available.
Using this process, Lex Machina is able to provide complete statistics in each state court we cover, for:
- Judges, counsel, and parties
- Case rulings and case resolutions
- Damages awarded at trial
Access to Comprehensive Sets of Documents
Lex Machina built its state court analytics using pleadings and significant court orders, which have been available to our customers with the launch of each state module. With millions of documents, users could easily see how a judge ruled in previous cases and discover opposing counsel’s track record in state court.
Now, Lex Machina users can retrieve any document of interest that is available from the courts’ online filing systems. Once retrieved, those documents then stay available in Lex Machina for all users, which further enriches the available data. This feature is incredibly important to users, as each use case is unique. Our customers can dig into the details of cases like theirs by searching for certain motions or orders and getting insights far beyond the docket entry text.
“Document retrieval is a popular feature with our federal court offerings, and we are excited to add that functionality to state court,” said Rydholm. “This was a big challenge because the various systems for state courts each function differently. We took on the challenge to bring customers a unified system for requesting documents and give them something unique to Lex Machina.”
State court expansion remains a top priority at Lex Machina. We are adding modules on a court-by-court basis, with an emphasis on strict data quality and integrity. Lex Machina currently offers Legal Analytics for 22 state courts including over 2.8 million individual cases. We are proud of this key achievement in our state court journey.
About LexisNexis Legal & Professional
LexisNexis Legal & Professional is a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business information and analytics that help customers increase productivity, improve decision-making and outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis® and Nexis® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 160 countries with 10,400 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.
About Lex Machina
Lex Machina 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 17 federal practice areas and a rapidly growing number of state courts. Lex Machina 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.
Lex Machina was named “2021 Legal Technology Trailblazer” (National Law Journal Trailblazer Awards, 2021), Winner of the “Media Excellence” Award for Analytics/Big Data (13th Annual Media Excellence Award, 2021), “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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