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Use Lexis+ Litigation Analytics to Inform Your Case Strategy
March 4, 2021
Today's TechnoLawyer Buyer's Guide report covers a new service that offers predictive insights on the actions of judges, courts, and opposing or outside counsel using their historical documents in state and federal courts.
Use Lexis+ Litigation Analytics to Inform Your Case Strategy
Experienced litigators develop a sixth sense. They understand certain judges and lawyers. But even at the largest firms, this collective experience has many gaps and walks out the front door every day — sometimes for good. Thanks to advances in machine learning, you can now get inside the heads of judges and opposing counsel even if it's your first time in a jurisdiction.
Lexis+ Litigation Analytics in One Sentence
Litigation Analytics on Lexis+ provides predictive insights on the actions of judges, courts, and opposing or outside counsel using their historical documents in state and federal courts.
The Killer Feature
Lexis+ launched last year with a modern visual design and suite of three integrated experiences — legal research, AI-based brief analysis, and practical guidance (read our coverage). Lexis+ Litigation Analytics is the fourth pillar of Lexis+. It's a new product 10 years in the making as it stands on the shoulders of litigation data pioneer Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company.
Competing litigation analytics products rely on PACER data and thus suffer from two flaws — they are limited to federal courts and they rely on dockets. By contrast, Lexis+ Litigation Analytics covers both state and federal courts, and uses the underlying documents for its data.
As you know, the listing of a brief on a docket contains only a fraction of the information in the brief itself. For example, dockets often list only the local counsel but Lexis+ Litigation Analytics gets the names of all the lawyers and law firms involved from the briefs. This ensures that you get the full picture when researching opposing counsel or evaluating prospective outside counsel.
"Lexis+ accelerates every aspect of the litigation experience - research, knowledge, legal intelligence, and document drafting, enabling practitioners to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently," says Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO, LexisNexis North America. "With Lexis+ Litigation Analytics, LexisNexis has made analytics more accessible to a broader range of practitioners to help them achieve more desirable legal outcomes."
The Time to Key Events chart provides insight as to how much time it will take a court, including a specific judge, to resolve a case via dismissal, settlement, or trial.
Other Notable Features
Lexis+ Litigation Analytics offers useful insights for assessing a lawsuit and also during litigation. In an existing case, you can analyze your judge via several charts — Cases Filed by Year, Cases by Type, Time to Key Events, and Trial Damages. You can also generate these charts for a court or opposing counsel. The Time to Key Events chart offers interval data on the time it takes your judge or a court to resolve a case via settlement, motion to dismiss, summary judgment, trial, etc. It also shows the number of cases for each key event.
The Courts & Judges Comparator tool offers even more power. It plots the data for up to four judges or courts so that you can compare them. In a pre-litigation context, you can use the Courts & Judges Comparator tool to assess the likelihood of success in a particular jurisdiction, including damages. This method of forum shopping offers more accuracy than relying on secondhand information.
In an active lawsuit, you can compare your judge to other judges and the court overall. For example, the Cases by Type chart tells you if the court assigns cases equally among judges or if some judges tend to specialize. The Time to Key Events chart exposes how efficiently or inefficiently your judge manages cases.
What Else Should You Know?
A key Lexis+ feature is integration across LexisNexis services. If you want to answer questions such as the likelihood of success of a motion to dismiss or for summary judgment, one click takes you to Lex Machina for an even deeper dive into the data.
Neil J. Squillante is the founder and publisher of TechnoLawyer, an award-winning network of free email newsletters for lawyers and law office administrators. Many consider TechnoLawyer newsletters the only ones they need. A Fastcase 50 award winner, Neil has a long track record of inventing successful advertising and publishing technologies and related best practices. Previously, Neil practiced commercial litigation at Am Law 100 firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. He received his J.D. from UCLA School of Law and his B.A. from Duke University. At UCLA, Neil served as a Managing Editor of UCLA Law Review.
