Lex Machina Launches Legal Analytics for New Practice Area: Class Action Litigation

USA/Canada News

08
Nov
2023

Editor

Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, announced today that it has officially released its new federal practice area of class action litigation (the “Class Action Module”), which provides Legal Analytics for over 140,000 cases with over $178 billion in approved class action settlement damages.

The Class Action Module includes cases in which a plaintiff alleges a claim on behalf of a group or class of individuals pleaded as Rule 23 class actions. It is a crucial area of law in which transparency and comprehension provide a critical edge. The new Class Action Module provides legal practitioners with essential insights on the key parties and outcomes involved in class action litigation, including judges, courts, law firms, attorneys, parties, findings, timing, and damages.

“Class action litigation is a high-profile, high-stakes area of law involving large numbers of parties and the potential for record-breaking damages awards,” said Andrew Judson, Lex Machina’s Lead Product Manager and class action legal data expert. “By its nature, the substance of the underlying claims in class action cases spans across the breadth of a multitude of other practice areas. The ability to easily understand the trends and patterns involving the key players and outcomes involved in this expansive, complex area of litigation creates a powerful strategic advantage. Lex Machina is proud to enable legal professionals to obtain these crucial data-driven insights through our new Legal Analytics.”

The Class Action Module incorporates an extensive collection of practice area-specific damages including approved class action settlement amounts, attorneys’ fees, and class representative awards, and estimated class sizes and non-monetary relief granted for cases with class action settlement awards. Additional class action analytics are available for class certification grants and denials, and reasons for denials. The inclusion of these unique parameters enables users to find the most relevant information and analytics quickly and easily.

The current set of Class Action Module cases, documents, and filters can help uncover insights such as:

• The top three most active districts by number of class action cases filed are the Southern District of New York, the Central District of California, and the Eastern District of New York.
• In class action cases terminated from 2018 to 2022, claimants prevailed in 51 cases at trial compared to claim defendants who prevailed in 37 cases at trial.
• Judge Valerie Caproni from the Southern District of New York had 172 class action cases terminated in 2022, at least one of which involved a class size of over 1 million members.
• Sessions, Israel & Shartle has the most experience representing defendants in class action cases filed in the Eastern District of New York from 2018 to 2022. Midland Credit Management, Inc. was the most active defendant during that time.
• The median time to class action settlement for class action cases terminated in the Northern District of California was 919 days.
• Judge Lorna Schofield from the Southern District of New York awarded $2.5 billion in class action damages from 2018 to 2022.
• There were 54 class action cases that were denied class certification on the basis of a finding of No 23(b)(3) Predominance and Superiority in the Northern District of Illinois.

As the only Legal Analytics platform that combines an exclusive natural language processing technology with attorney review to analyze the court documents included in Class Action Module, Lex Machina does the difficult work of creating accurate analytics that are cleaned, corrected, and enhanced. This exclusive process allows Lex Machina to provide comprehensive data-driven insights about courts, judges, law firms, lawyers, and parties involved in class action litigation.

Class action joins the 21 other federal practice areas already available on the platform, bringing the total number of federal cases to over 3.5 million. Lex Machina is proud of this key achievement.