If the title of this post makes you think I’ve been living under a rock for a few years, I completely understand. To say that litigation analytics are new to Lexis would be highly inaccurate — LexisNexis has a vast suite of analytics tools, Litigation Profile Suite and Context, to name just a couple, not to mention the case law analytics available through Ravel Law‘s visualization technology — but their newest analytics product, Litigation Analytics, stands out in a couple of key ways.
First, Litigation Analytics is an analytics tool within the Lexis+ research platform, rather than a standalone product. From the Lexis+ homepage, users access the tool from the left-hand menu.
Second, Litigation Analytics offers vastly different information than their next most recent analytics product, Context, which launched a few years ago. Litigation Analytics harnesses the power of Lex Machina, a legal analytics company LexisNexis acquired in 2017, to provide a bird’s-eye view of the caseloads of particular judges, courts, attorneys, or firms. This includes everything from the overall number of cases per year, case types, length of cases, and damages. You also have the ability to compare analytics with another court, judge, firm, or attorney. Context, on the other hand, takes a deeper dive into the behavior of judges, courts, and firms, looking at activity at the motion level, identifying most-cited opinions, most-cited judges, and most-cited language. (My favorite feature is their analytics on expert witnesses. But I digress….)
To dive deeper into the analytics in Litigation Analytics, you can link out to the Lex Machina platform. If you do not have a subscription to Lex Machina, there are advantages and limitations here. The advantage is that you can still look at the data on Lex Machina, even without a subscription to the product, but the limitation is that you cannot do much with that data; it is in read-only form, so you cannot drill down deeper into the data to learn more, without that separate subscription to Lex Machina (see Image 3 as a reference).
Comparisons will certainly be measured in the future between Lexis+ Litigation Analytics and similar products from competitors, but within the LexisNexis suite of products, Litigation Analytics is certainly a powerful new tool, and the fact that it is incorporated into the Lexis+ research suite is an added bonus. If you have access to this product, be sure to try it out. With Casemaker and Fastcase’s recent merger announcement and their intent to focus on analytics as well, it’s clear that litigation analytics will continue to be the development future for legal research platforms. Lexis+ Litigation Analytics is just the next step.
For more write-ups on Litigation Analytics, check out Frank Ready’s article on Law.com , Jean O’Grady’s post on Dewey B Strategic, and Bob Ambrogi’s post on LawSites.
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