Exclusive Interview with Aria Nejad, In-House Counsel, Lex Machina

Chasing a legal case requires meticulous planning, analysis, and detecting anomalies all along its course, which may take years, and in some cases, decades to conclude. Legal analytics is a branch of data science that is proving to be of immense help to attorneys in their legal work. Lex Machina, is a legal analytics firm that leverages analytics and data combined with attorney inputs to come up with rare legal insights. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Aria Nejad, In-House Counsel, of Lex Machina.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.    

Lex Machina's journey from a small venture-backed start-up in 2010 to its position in 2022 as the leader of the legal analytics movement demonstrates how quickly and profoundly data-driven decision-making has transformed the business and the practice of law in the United States. In short, we provide legal analytics to law firms and companies. We enable them to craft successful strategies, win cases, and close business. The practice of law is highly competitive and we help litigators gain an edge using the most accurate legal analytics in the industry. We process litigation data and reveal insights never before available about judges, lawyers, parties, and the subjects of the cases themselves. We call these insights legal analytics because analytics involves the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data.

With this data, for the first time, lawyers can predict the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce. Our clients also use Lex Machina to land new clients by providing winning pitch decks that demonstrate specific subject matter expertise, familiarity with opposing parties and counsel, experience in front of a specific judge, and available bandwidth. Corporate counsel uses Lex Machina to select and manage outside counsel and set litigation strategies and tactics.

Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

Lex Machina was named "Greater Bay Area Top Workplaces 2022" (The San Francisco Chronicle), "Legal Tech Company of the Year 2021" award (CIO Review), and "2021 Legal Technology Trailblazer" (National Law Journal Trailblazer Awards, 2021), Winner of the "Media Excellence" Award for Analytics/Big Data (13th Annual Media Excellence Award, 2021), "Best Decision Management Solution" (AI Breakthrough Awards, 2019), and "Disruptor of the Year" (Changing Lawyer Awards, 2019). We consider feedback from satisfied clients as the greatest award. They often use Lex Machina to evaluate the viability of the defendant, check their legitimacy, or predict their response to litigation, and at times allow them to respond to clients' queries with insightful inputs.

What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?

Lex Machina focuses on outcome analytics – what happens in cases like yours – something that none of our competitors or their products specialize in. Outcome analytics include remedies, findings, case resolutions, and damages. Unless you know about the possible outcomes for a proceeding, you cannot design a winning formula for litigation success. That is something unique to Lex Machina. Since Lex Machina created legal analytics approximately ten years ago, several established legal publishers have released tools they call litigation analytics. Most of these take available court data at face value and present this information as graphs and charts, without doing the heavy lifting of reading, cleaning, categorizing, or fixing the many errors the raw litigation data contains.

Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

Imagine you get a call from a client looking to sue a company for a contract breach. Within seconds, Lex Machina's legal analytics can provide you and your client with enough relevant information to determine whether such a lawsuit makes sense. Diving deep into litigation data can show you insights like how often this party has been sued and how similar contract breach cases fared with a particular judge, allowing you to anticipate case resolutions, case timing, damages awarded, and more. Before legal analytics, achieving this level of insight could take a team of highly paid legal professionals days or even weeks, with neither the accuracy nor the depth that today's advanced technologies can provide in mere minutes.

If the case moves forward, legal analytics can present critical insights into the behavior and track the record of the opposing law firm and its lawyers, showcasing their success rates in contract breach cases both on the plaintiff and defendant sides. You will see how long similar contract breach cases have taken in your particular venue, in front of a particular judge, and against the company your client is looking to sue. You can learn at what point the cases were terminated, such as at summary judgment or trial. Last but not least, the data can illuminate potential damages that have been awarded in similar cases so you can weigh the potential risk against a possible windfall. Timing and damages data are critical for lawyers to estimate how much a legal matter might cost.

What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

State court expansion remains a top priority at Lex Machina. We're adding modules on a court-by-court basis, with an emphasis on strict data quality and integrity. We currently offer legal analytics for 27 state courts, which encompasses over 3.3 million individual cases. We are proud of this key achievement in our state court journey and will continue to grow our coverage over the next year and beyond.

We recently launched our State Motion Metrics which helps users quickly assess their motion strategy and easily identify winning arguments. This is our first feature using a cutting-edge deep learning model. Lex Machina has released State Motion Metrics for the four Delaware state courts, including the Delaware Court of Chancery, as well as Los Angeles County Superior Court, with additional plans to roll out State Motion Metrics in more courts later this year.

How does your company's rich expertise help uncover patterns with powerful analytics and machine learning?

We do the heavy lifting of reading, cleaning, categorizing, or fixing the many errors that raw litigation data contains. We use natural language processing and machine learning to enhance our litigation data. This is the first step in gathering raw information, reading and analyzing each court document, correcting erroneous data, and supplementing the missing data. We use signature block analyzers to update and add the correct law firms and attorneys to all the cases they worked on, even if they don't appear on the face of the docket sheet.

But we go even further. To be completely confident in our analytics, we supplement our technology with the second step of human attorney review. Every single Lex Machina employee who reviews cases has a legal background. We use a cutting-edge deep learning model to create the new State Motion Metrics, and Lex Machina's attorneys apply and test the model for accuracy and completeness.