By Rakesh Sharma. This article originally appeared on Forbes, October 29, 2013.
In recent times, services such as LexisNexis and WestLaw, that crawl through multiple documents, filings, and databases, have become extremely popular with lawyers. This is because they are convenient, quick and provide their subscribers with detailed information regarding a particular topic and case. However, it is difficult to find specific information regarding a case or topic using such databases. More often than not, that depends on the level of skill and expertise of a lawyer. For example, lawyers lacking query expertise would need to wade through numerous pages to find specific cases related to, say, a practice area such as patent litigation.
However, help might be here soon: Lex Machina is a service that provides litigation data and analytics specifically related to Intellectual Property or IP cases.
Lex Machina’s chief executive officer Josh Becker cites Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley’s reference to the rise of “Anecdata” (or, the combination of analytics and law) in the legal profession as a starting point for his solution.
But, the serial entrepreneur and Stanford alum chooses different words to describe Lex Machina. He says their patented engine – Lexpressions™ – is Neuro-linguistic Programming and Artificial Intelligence optimized for law. It uses search technology to comb through an assortment of legal databases, including 94 district databases and multiple federal databases for data related to patent litigation to provide information and case analytics. The search result listings typically contain information from all aspects of a case, including location, company, and judges associated with that case. The service, which has already received venture funding, took four years from idea to execution.
This is not the first time that a service has promised to trawl through large databases to provide lawyers with past precedents and case history. LexisNexis and WestLaw have already cornered that market. Lex Machina, however, is a specialized service for patent litigation. It was originally part of the Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse project that was intended to bring “openness and transparency to IP law.” The project was funded by tech behemoths such as Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco. Subsequently, Becker and his colleagues converted the project into a commercial enterprise that provides services to a variety of customers from companies, law firms, to academics and students.
According to Becker, their service helps in four areas of litigation. First, it helps early case assessment by extracting data patterns to determine the extent and scope of the case. For example, you can determine levels of engagement with patent trolls based on their past history. Second, it looks at success ratios to enable you to help and select manage outside counsel for your case. Third, it helps benchmark a law firm’s (or, lawyer’s) performance against that of its peers. This means that they can generate lists across multiple performance metrics using data from the solution. The fourth and final use case for the website is a transactional one. Companies and law firms can use the website for multiple use cases ranging from Patent Similarity Engines, which provide estimates of value associated with an IP, to costs associated with IP litigation.
Alistair Scoll, co-chair of the Strata conference, described Lex Machina as an “ethically provocative” product, when it was introduced at the conference earlier this year. Certainly there are arguments to be made against the product’s utility. For one, it has the potential to shift the patent-related discussion (and, determining criteria for such cases) from ethics to data. Hence, the scope for a case becomes reductive and deterministic. Then, there is the reliability of probability estimates generated by the service.
For example, assuming significantly accurate estimates, is it worth fighting a patent troll with a high success ratio? Becker says the answer to that question depends on the lawyer. He explains that Lex Machina is a decision support system. “There are some services that throw a lot of data at people (and let them sort out the data amongst themselves),” he says. According to Becker, Lex Machina’s approach is a pedagogical one and rooted in its academic pedigree (the solution’s founders are from Stanford University). “Our system is built to answer questions (to specific questions),” he says. This means that you can enter queries analogous to specific questions and the system searches out the answer from its database. “We are just making it easy for lawyers (to find answers to their questions),” says Becker.
Ease-of-use, however, can also be the first step in creating a new market and changing the dynamics of an industry. With its combination of hard data and search technology, Big Data has the potential to upend the legal profession, where success rates are measured through a combination of intuition and experience gleaned through years of hard work.
Becker discounts that possibility. “We are not replacing lawyers,” he clarifies. Instead, he categorizes the solution as a check on a lawyer’s intuition. For example, the system serves to validate a lawyer’s thesis with data, if she has already developed specific strategies for a case. Data from the solution can also serve as an important indicator for the odds of settling a case with minimal damage. For example, based on data from past precedents, a lawyer can optimize the time and settlement of a patent case.
Eventually, though, Becker says their software is an effort to bring the legal profession into the 21st century. “Lawyers are not really early tech adopters,” he says, citing the prevalence of Word Perfect in lawyer’s offices even today. However, old lawyers, comfortable with the word processing software mentioned earlier, are increasingly being replaced by young lawyers, who are comfortable with the latest technology and data-based decision making. Lex Machina is squarely targeted at these professionals. “The legal profession is an old world profession,” says Becker. “We are helping bring it to this century.”