Lex Machina’s New Attorney Data Engine Improves Accuracy of Litigation Data
Enhances federal litigation data to accurately associate attorneys with cases, ensuring that attorneys don’t miss critical information
Menlo Park, CA — February 9, 2016 — Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company and creator of Legal Analytics®, today announced the release of its Attorney Data Engine, an exclusive new capability that dramatically improves the quality and accuracy of attorney data for District Court cases.
District Court data provided by PACER includes attorney and law firm information that is frequently inaccurate, incomplete, or flat out wrong. For example, PACER IP cases in the districts of Delaware and New Jersey fail to include 46% of attorneys who have worked on those cases. With its new Attorney Data Engine, Lex Machina provides lawyers with complete data about who worked on what case, helping them to land more clients and win more cases.
“With our new Attorney Data Engine, Lex Machina continues to innovate and push the boundaries of Legal Analytics,” said Karl Harris, CTO & VP Products at Lex Machina. “We are today the best source of accurate and reliable attorney data, which provides our customers with a real competitive advantage when it comes to crafting successful litigation strategy.”
The Attorney Data Engine can make a big difference when a law firm is pitching a new client and wants to contrast its experience with that of competing counsel. For example, raw PACER case data suggests that Delaware is not one of the top five districts where Kirkland & Ellis has the most IP experience. But Lex Machina’s Attorney Data Engine reveals that, since 2000, Kirkland & Ellis has litigated more IP cases in Delaware than in any other district.
Lex Machina’s Attorney Data Engine is powered by three new components that mine attorney and law firm information from PACER in different ways.
- Signature Block Analyzer: Extracts attorney and law firm data directly from the signature blocks of court documents, disclosing all attorneys who worked on a case– not just the lead counsel and firms that are listed in PACER meta-data fields. Signature Block Analyzer will initially be rolled out for the districts of New Jersey and Delaware, with other districts soon to follow.
- Pro Hac Vice Extractor: Identifies and associates attorneys with cases for which they were admitted pro hac vice. These attorneys are often missing from PACER’s basic counsel data, which obscures these attorneys’ true depth of case knowledge and experience. With Pro Hac Vice Extractor, Lex Machina has added this important information to its Legal Analytics platform.
- Historic Snapshots: Lex Machina stores daily snapshots of PACER data, providing historical information about which attorneys and law firms worked for which clients on which cases at any given time. Currently, if an associate who previously worked on a case for a client switches law firms, PACER often attributes that case to the associate’s new firm, even though that new firm may never have represented that client. Only Lex Machina’s Attorney Data Engine can correctly keep track of moving lawyers.
The new Attorney Data Engine is available to provide accurate attorney data to all Lex Machina customers with today’s release.
About Lex Machina
Lex Machina’s award-winning Legal Analytics® platform is a new category of legal technology that fundamentally changes how companies and law firms compete in the business and practice of law. Delivered as Software-as a-Service, Lex Machina provides strategic insights on judges, lawyers, parties, and IP, mined from millions of pages of legal information. This enables law firms and companies to predict the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce, helping them to win cases and close business.
Lex Machina is used by established companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Nike, and eBay, and prominent law firms like Wilson Sonsini, Fish & Richardson, and Fenwick & West. Lex Machina was named one of the “Best New Legal Services” by readers of The Recorder in 2014 and 2015, and received the “Best New Product of the Year” award in 2015 from the American Association of Law Libraries.
Based in Silicon Valley, Lex Machina is part of LexisNexis, a leading information provider and a pioneer in delivering trusted legal content and insights through innovative research and productivity solutions, supporting the needs of legal professionals at every step of their workflow. By harnessing the power of Big Data, LexisNexis provides legal professionals with essential information and insights derived from an unmatched collection of legal and news content—fueling productivity, confidence and better outcomes.