Three Key Components to Superior Legal Analytics

Gloria Huang, Legal Content Associate, Lex Machina

Lex Machina provides superior, comprehensive Legal Analytics on a myriad of key facets and entities involved in federal and state litigation. Our customers include law firms, companies, judges, and governmental organizations, and they leverage the data-driven insights derived from our Legal Analytics in a broad range of ways. Whether it’s crafting their strongest litigation strategy or gaining a competitive advantage in winning new business, evaluating potential outside counsel or assessing peers or competitors, Lex Machina’s Legal Analytics enhances the workflow and results of any legal professional.

Over the past ten years, since Lex Machina first created Legal Analytics, several legal tech companies have entered the ring and released tools they refer to as litigation analytics. Unfortunately, most of these companies simply cull available court data and present it, untouched and unrefined, as graphs or charts. They do not undergo the difficult but essential work of reading, cleaning, categorizing, and fixing the imperfect raw litigation data.

This work is exactly what Lex Machina prides itself on most as we strive to bring Legal Analytics to all areas of the law. We are proud, not only because we are the leading litigation analytics platform, but because we are the only analytics provider with the depth, detail, and nuance of information that is necessary for your success.

There are three key steps that Lex Machina takes, all of which are crucial in ensuring our legal data is the best in the industry:

Our Technology: Organizing, Refining, and Supplementing Docket Data

In our detailed process of refining litigation data, the first step Lex Machina takes is to gather raw information, read and analyze each court document, correct any erroneous data, and supplement any missing data. We do this by using Lexpressions®, which is our patented unique approach that employs machine learning and natural language processing to enhance litigation data.

Any legal professional familiar with large-scale docket systems knows that the names of law firms and attorneys are often missing or incorrect on the faces of docket sheets. Lex Machina addresses this significant challenge by employing our exclusive Attorney Data Engine™ and Signature Block Analyzer™. This unparalleled technology updates and adds the correct names of every law firm and attorney to the cases they worked on, regardless of how or if they appeared on the docket sheet itself.

Our Attorneys: Reviewing and Annotating Key Activity

As crucial as our technology is to the process of cleaning litigation data, we know it’s not enough to stop there. The second step Lex Machina takes is to supplement our technology with human attorney review. Not only does this allow us to be completely confident in our Legal Analytics, but it also enables us to provide powerful Legal Analytics such as our unique Outcome Analytics™, which is based on important orders such as restraint of trade findings at trial or findings of patent infringement at summary judgment.

The members of Lex Machina’s data team deploy their particular practice-area expertise and sharpened comprehension of complex legal language in order to ensure that all cases are interpreted and processed correctly. Every single Lex Machina employee that reviews a case comes from a legal background, because we know accuracy is of utmost importance in the legal profession. This step augments our industry-leading process so that the legal professionals who rely on our analytics can be confident they’re relying on the most complete and accurate information out there.

Our Users: Customizing Analytics

The final step in the process occurs after Lex Machina has employed our technology and attorney review to accurately clean, tag, code, and enhance the litigation data. The data is then packaged into attractive, clean Legal Analytics that can easily be filtered or customized so you derive the most valuable insights and trends that are relevant to your particular legal matter at hand. Lex Machina delivers comprehensive Legal Analytics on entities such as judges, counsel, and parties, as well as high-value datasets such as case resolutions, findings, remedies, and damages. Litigators have especially reported valuing unique capabilities such as our Outcome Analytics™, Case List Analyzer™, Attorney Data Engine™, and Quick Tools.

Lex Machina’s three-step process comprises the three essential components that are necessary for the only kind of superior Legal Analytics you should be relying on. It’s this refined and cleaned Legal Analytics that will provide you with the unique strategic insights that are critical to gaining a winning edge in the highly competitive practice and business of law.