A task legion to intellectual property lawyers is how to develop a litigation strategy that factors in all the complexity of a typical IP case, including current trends in specific jurisdictions and general leadings of jurists. Enter data analysis tools such as Lex Machina (lexmachina.com) that help lawyers craft a successful plan and perhaps even forecast the case result—no longer via a wing and a prayer, but by the numbers.
Lex Machina, born at Stanford University and now backed by venture firms and angel investors, is a web-based software and data analysis service that creates structured or tagged data sets of judges, lawyers, parties and patents gleaned from case dockets and documents obtained from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, the U.S. International Trade Commission’s Electronic Documents Information System, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. LM will soon add proceedings before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
