This week Lex Machina reached a significant state court analytics milestone with the addition of the 100th state court. Lex Machina .launched as a patent litigation analytics project out of Stanford. in 2008 . Since acquisition by LexisNexis the platform it was expanded to cover business litigation in all federal trial courts. The company took on the challenges onf taming the disparate and unruly world of state court litigation. with the inaugural state court launch of Delaware Chancery in 2018. T
Valuable New Tranche of Corporate Litigation. The reached the 100 state court mark recently with the addition of litigation analytics for Suffolk County Supreme Court and Westchester County Supreme Court (the “New York Courts”) and Oklahoma County District Court (the “Oklahoma Court”). They previously launched the five counties within the boundaries of New York City (New York, Kings, Queens, Richmond and the Bronx) in 2020. As a former New Yorker I am astonished that it took four years to reach these two suburban boroughs. These counties are home to some major corporate players. Westchester is home to companies much as Mastercard, Pepsi, IBM and Regeneron. Suffolk is home to the likes of Canon USA, Estee Lauder, Lenovo and Nikon USA – not to mention the Hampton’s “gold coast.” This is a valuable new data tranche.
The Filters. The enhanced state court analytics offer the standard Lex Machina benchmarking data on judges, courts, law firms, individual attorneys. Notable features of this enhanced
coverage include filters for trial rulings, trial resolutions, and trial damages, and the ability to quickly drill down to relevant data sets using an extensive collection of filters for case types and documents. Additional functionality includes cross-court filters to conduct state-wide searches and multi-court analytics on judges, courts, law firms, attorneys, and parties.
Lex Machina now include over 5.5. million civil cases. The New York Courts added over 240,000 civil cases and the Oklahoma Court added over 140,000 civil cases.
“We know how important it is for the legal community to be able to gain insights into specific state courts, given the bulk of litigation that takes place in those state court venues,” said Chuan Qin, product manager at Lex Machina and lead on the New York and Oklahoma state court modules. “That’s why we’re especially proud that our ever-expanding enhanced coverage of state courts has reached a milestone of one hundred courts. Adding these enhanced state courts in New York and Oklahoma brings our coverage to the majority of the population in each state, and it provides our customers with crucial insights in these venues.”
The press release includes examples of analytics for the new courts between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2023:
- The total damages awarded at trial for medical malpractice cases in Suffolk County and Westchester County Supreme Courts, excluding attorney’s fees, was $14.7 million.
- The judge with the highest number of Commercial Division cases in Westchester County Supreme Court was Judge Gretchen M Walsh (currently at 433 cases).
- The number of cases filed in 2023 in Oklahoma County District Court was 18,999.
- The median time to trial (currently at 242 cases) in Suffolk County Supreme Court was 1,467 days.
Accessing and normalizing state court data is a huge challenge due to variations in tagging, formatting and technological idiosyncrasies. Lex Machina applies both artificial intelligence with attorney review to analyze state court documents. The press release notes that “In the absence of a unified system for state courts, Lex Machina does the difficult work of understanding the individual docketing practice of each state court system, and creates accurate analytics that reflect the unique aspects of the individual courts.”
Congratulations to LexisNexis and Lex Machina on reaching the 100 court milestone!
