USA/Canada News
Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, today announced the highly anticipated expansion of its award-winning Legal Analytics® platform to cover trade secret litigation – the platform’s tenth practice area. The new module encompasses over 9,600 cases involving trade secret litigation pending in federal court since 2009, including those filed under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) of 2016.
“Trade secret analytics has been among the most requested additions to Lex Machina’s platform because, until now, finding and analyzing specific cases involving trade secret litigation has been extremely difficult, costly and time consuming,” said Karl Harris, President and COO at Lex Machina. “The new trade secret litigation module gives attorneys access to the largest, most comprehensive and accurate dataset available for analyzing trade secret misappropriation cases.”
Prior to the DTSA, cases involving trade secrets were litigating a state or common law claim in federal court. This could only happen when the case also met the strict jurisdictional requirements for federal court: disputes involving diverse parties and an amount in controversy greater than $75,000, or disputes involving federal law. As a result, these cases were often combined with other types of cases – e.g., patent, trademark, commercial, employment, etc. This combination with other claims made it difficult to locate trade secret misappropriation cases
The module provides valuable data-driven insights and trends in cases alleging misappropriation of trade secrets under state law for cases open in U.S. district court from 2009 through present and for cases with DTSA claims since its enactment on May 11, 2016. It also illuminates the track records of opposing counsel and parties, the experience and behaviors of judges, plus case timing, resolutions, remedies, damages, injunctions and more.
“Recent high-profile cases and shifts in American trade policies have propelled trade secret litigation into the spotlight,” continued Harris. “With Legal Analytics, attorneys can now get instant answers to questions that can help them formulate winning strategies such as: Does this lawsuit have a reasonable chance for a temporary restraining order? What cases or types of cases have resulted in damages or an injunction? Or, what type of relief has this judge granted in the past for DTSA causes of action?”
Because there are no Nature of Suit (NOS) codes for trade secrets cases in PACER, the database of district court case filings, Lex Machina had to train its natural language processing algorithms to search for specific trade secret-related terms, then data-mine millions of PACER documents to identify and tag relevant cases. Once tagged, Legal Analytics can now isolate trade secret misappropriation claims in commercial, employment or intellectual property cases. This enables attorneys to better filter and analyze the trade secrets elements of these combined cases and prepare winning legal strategies.
In addition, Lex Machina interviewed senior litigators from top law firms and major corporations with expertise in trade secret misappropriation litigation and implemented their feedback on particular analytics requirements and use cases.
With the launch of its trade secret module, Lex Machina has uncovered some interesting insights within the data including:
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