Lex Machina Releases Legal Analytics for First Amendment Litigation, the Final Component of its Civil Rights Litigation Dataset

Lex Machina has released over 40,000 cases involving First Amendment litigation, achieving its full civil rights coverage

MENLO PARK, Calif., May 30, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, recently released expanded Legal Analytics for litigation involving claims brought pursuant to the First Amendment, Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) (the "First Amendment Cases"). Consisting of more than 40,000 cases, the First Amendment Cases give practitioners critical insights on judges, courts, law firms, attorneys, and parties involved in litigation under the relevant statutes.

This release marks the final stage in Lex Machina's achievement of full civil rights coverage. The First Amendment Cases join the civil rights datasets already available on the platform:

• ADA (113,000+ cases);
• Police Action (79,000+ cases);
• Education (16,000+ cases);
• Fair Housing Act (9,000+ cases); and
• Voting Rights (2,000+ cases).

"Civil rights is a crucial area of law, and in order to best provide Legal Analytics to the legal community in a way that prioritizes accuracy, comprehensiveness, and speed, we've been releasing subsets of civil rights cases as individual modules over the last few years," said Samantha Pallini, Lex Machina's Legal Data Expert in Civil Rights. "We're incredibly excited to achieve full completion of our civil rights litigation dataset with this newest release of First Amendment Cases. Now, attorneys can hone in on the civil rights data most relevant to them and their case in even more thoughtful, targeted ways."

The full civil rights dataset incorporates notable features such as filters for each subsection of cases. It also incorporates an extensive collection of practice-area specific damages, remedies, and findings. Here are a few of the findings specific to the subsets of civil rights cases offered by Lex Machina:

• First Amendment: First Amendment Retaliation; Freedom of Speech Violation
• ADA: ADA Violation: Discrimination; ADA Violation: Retaliation
• Police Action: Excessive Force Violation; Search and Seizure Violation
• Education: Title IX Discrimination; IDEA Violation
• Fair Housing Act: FHA Violation: Discrimination; FHA Violation: Failure to Accommodate
• Voting Rights: Voting Rights Act Violation; 15th Amendment Violation

The inclusion of these unique parameters allows you to quickly focus on the cases most relevant to your own.

With the recently released First Amendment Cases, our research uncovered the following data trends for those First Amendment Cases filed between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2023:

• Five times as many cases were resolved in favor of claim defendants compared to claimants, primarily on summary judgment and judgment on the pleadings.
• The highest number of cases (2,036) was filed in the Central District of California.
• 1,123 cases went to trial in a median of 857 days.
• Total amount of compensatory damages awarded, excluding attorneys' fees, was $53 billion.
• Courts found No Freedom of Speech Violation in 1,651 cases, and found Freedom of Speech Violation in 432 cases.

By combining an exclusive artificially intelligent technology with attorney review to analyze court documents, Lex Machina does the difficult work of creating accurate analytics that are cleaned, corrected, and enhanced. This process allows Lex Machina to provide comprehensive data-driven insights about judges, law firms, individual attorneys, and parties. 

The First Amendment Cases join the other civil rights modules already available on Lex Machina. They bring our total civil rights cases to over 240,000 and our total federal district court cases to over 3.7 million. We are proud of this key achievement.

About LexisNexis Legal & Professional
LexisNexis Legal & Professional^® provides legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics that help customers increase their productivity, improve decision-making, achieve better outcomes, and advance the rule of law around the world. As a digital pioneer, the company was the first to bring legal and business information online with its Lexis^® and Nexis^® services. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, which serves customers in more than 150 countries with 11,800 employees worldwide, is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.

About Lex Machina
Lex Machina fundamentally changes how companies and law firms compete in the business and practice of law. The company provides strategic insights on judges, lawyers, law firms, parties, and other critical information across 22 federal practice areas and a rapidly growing number of state courts. Lex Machina allows law firms and companies to anticipate the behaviors and outcomes that different legal strategies will produce, enabling them to win cases and close business.

Lex Machina was named Winner of the "Media Excellence Award" for Analytics/Big Data 2024, "Great Places to Work 2023-2024", one of "Legal Tech's Most Promising Solution Providers" (CIO Review Awards 2022), "Greater Bay Area Top Workplaces 2022" (The San Francisco Chronicle Top Workplaces in the Bay Area 2022), "Legal Tech Company of the Year 2021" (CIO Review, 2021), "2021 Legal Technology Trailblazer" (National Law Journal Trailblazer Awards, 2021), and Winner of the "Media Excellence" Award for Analytics/Big Data (13th Annual Media Excellence Award, 2021). Based in Silicon Valley, Lex Machina is part of LexisNexis, a leading global provider of legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics. For more information, please visit www.lexmachina.com.

SOURCE LEX MACHINA