Lex Machina® Expands California State Court Coverage With Seven Major Counties

Lex Machina has added over 1.5 million cases in seven California counties, bringing its total state court case count to over 2.5 million cases.

Lex Machina and LexisNexis recently released a seventh California county, Orange County Superior Court. The team has now released the following seven major California courts:

• Los Angeles County Superior Court (serves 10 million citizens)
• Sacramento County Superior Court (serves 1.5 million citizens)
• San Diego County Superior Court (serves 3.3 million citizens)
• Riverside County Superior Court (serves 2.5 million citizens)
• San Bernardino County Superior Court (serves 2.2 million citizens)
• Alameda County Superior Court (serves 1.5 million citizens)
• Orange County Superior Court (serves 3.1 million citizens)

These seven California counties are key courts for civil cases involving contracts, torts, employment and other civil matters, and serve more than 24 million citizens. These modules leverage the benefits of Lex Machina machine learning and attorney review to extract crucial data-driven insights from millions of state court documents. Lex Machina® Legal Analytics® are now available for any superior court civil trial case filed in any of these seven California courts.

As the only Legal Analytics platform that combines an exclusive natural language processing technology with attorney review to analyze state court documents. Lex Machina is providing a unique solution to a significant technical challenge. In the absence of a unified system for state courts, Lex Machina does the difficult work of understanding the individual docketing practice of each state court system, and creates accurate analytics that reflect the unique aspects of the individual courts. This exclusive process allows Lex Machina to provide detailed data-driven insights about judges, law firms, individual attorneys and parties in state courts. Lex Machina ensures the state court data and analytics are up to date by maintaining technology that continuously captures and enhances raw data from the state courts. 

State court expansion remains a top priority at Lex Machina. We plan to release more state court modules throughout the coming years. We are adding modules on a court-by-court basis, with an emphasis on strict data quality and integrity. That includes downloading millions of state court documents to ensure that practitioners have access to the most complete, comprehensive and accurate analytics available. For example, for Los Angeles County Superior Court alone, Lex Machina has downloaded nearly 2 million documents that serve as the content foundation for creating the highest caliber data for judges, law firms, attorneys and parties, and adding high-value case coding for cases that reach trial.

“By achieving coverage of these seven key California courts, Lex Machina continues to help our customers succeed in new ways,” said Karl Harris, CEO of Lex Machina. “These seven California state court modules cover over 1.5 million cases in courts that serve 24 million citizens. They are key milestones on our journey to expand our coverage to all jurisdictions, while ensuring we maintain the accuracy and detail our customers have come to expect from us.”

The California modules incorporate notable features such as filters for general jurisdiction cases, limited jurisdiction cases, collections cases and CRC 3.4 complex cases. They also include an extensive collection of case types and document tags, including a document tag for CCP 170.6 challenges. The inclusion of these unique parameters provides even greater capability in organizing and understanding the analytics.

With our current set of California state court modules, our research uncovered the following data trends for all of the cases filed in the seven state courts between January 1, 2016 and March 31, 2021:

• Total amount of damages awarded at trial, including attorneys’ fees, was $2,366,105,605
• 1,880 cases resulted in a jury verdict ruling
• In 2020, 269,724 total cases were filed
• In Los Angeles County Superior Court, the median time to trial (for 8,781 cases) was 467 days compared to Sacramento County Superior Court, where the median time to trial (for 979 cases) was 392 days

These state courts join the other state court modules already available on Lex Machina, comprising a current total of 17 state courts. The addition of the seven California modules adds over 1.5 million civil court cases filed since January 2016 to the Lex Machina state court database, bringing our total number of state court cases to over 2.5 million. We are proud of this key achievement in our state court journey.

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