Last month, I had the pleasure of reporting Lex Machina’s expansion into commercial law with their award-winning Legal Analytics® platform. Our friends haven’t been resting on their laurels after a successful launch, though. This month, the LexisNexis company launched another expansion; this latest offering deals with employment law, specifically federal court cases.
This marks a big step forward for Lex Machina. This area of law is quite broad. According to USLegal.com, it includes “all areas of the employer/employee relationship except the negotiation process covered by labor law and collective bargaining.” It is also, per Lex Machina’s press release, “the largest practice area to be added since the platform’s launch in 2010.”
As with other areas covered by Legal Analytics®, the employment law expansion was designed with busy attorneys in mind. This expansion includes the following types of cases:
- “Discrimination cases involve claims under federal statutes that prohibit adverse employment actions against members of a protected class.
- Harassment cases involve claims of unwelcome conduct based on an employee’s protected status.
- Retaliation / hostile work environment involve claims that an employer punished or retaliated against an employee because the employee engaged in a legally protected activity.”
In other words, if you’re looking for the number of times lost wages damages have been awarded and the specific amounts, check Lex Machina’s Legal Analytics® employment law database. Likewise, you’ll find valuable information on specifics, such as:
- Law firms with the most experience defending particular corporate clients;
- The chances of getting a summary judgment order from a specific judge;
- The number of times – and specific case information – that judges in a certain jurisdiction found a work environment to be hostile.
Lex Machina’s employment law expansion wasn’t designed in a vacuum, either. Developers interviewed “employment litigators from top law firms and major corporations to better understand their particular use cases, and incorporated their feedback directly into the new offering.”
According to the company, the employment expansion includes “three million docket entries and 36 employment-specific tags for damages, findings and remedies.”
This information is based on cases filed between January 1, 2009 through June 30, 2017. Another example of the information employment attorneys can find in Legal Analytics® is the breakdown of cases by type. During the referenced time period, discrimination lawsuits comprised 87% of cases with retaliation suits coming in at 66% and harassment cases at 35%. Employment law often involves different types of claims overlapping each other, such as discrimination and retaliation (54%), and cases with all three types of claims (24%).
Number of cases tagged as Discrimination, Harassment, and/or Retaliation with overlaps (cases filed 2009 through 2017 Q2)
Owen Byrd, Lex Machina’s Chief Evangelist and General Counsel, said, “Federal employment cases alleging discrimination, retaliation, or harassment cut to the core of the employee-employer relationship. The stakes are high for plaintiffs and defendants. For the first time, parties and their counsel will be able to set litigation strategy and tactics in federal employment cases based on actual events and outcomes in prior cases with similar claims.”
As you can see, Legal Analytics® is a valuable tool for employment law attorneys.
Look for another platform expansion, this one dealing with labor and Americans with Disabilities Act cases, coming in the fall.
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 more, mined from millions of pages of legal information. This allows law firms and companies to predict the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce, enabling them to win cases and close business.
Lex Machina was named “Best Legal Analytics” by readers of The Recorder in 2014, 2015 and 2016, 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. For more information, please visit www.lexmachina.com.
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