Lex Machina Adds Employment Litigation to its Award-Winning Legal Analytics Platform

USA/Canada News

12
Jul
2017

Editor

Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, today announced the expansion of its award-winning Legal Analytics® platform into employment law. The new employment litigation module includes over 70,000 discrimination, retaliation, and harassment cases pending in federal court since 2009.

It provides attorneys with data-driven insights and trends in case timing, resolutions, damages, remedies, and findings, as well as actionable intelligence on opposing counsel, law firms, parties, judges, venues, and more, which help them create winning legal strategies for their clients.

The new employment module comes shortly after Lex Machina’s expansion into commercial litigation last month, and furthers the company’s commitment to expand Legal Analytics into every practice area, including labor and Americans with Disabilities Act cases in the fall. Employment is now the largest practice area to be added since the platform’s launch in 2010.

Lex Machina is the only solution with practice area-specific tags that are critical for enabling true Legal Analytics and providing attorneys with a distinct competitive advantage in employment litigation. As part of the product development process, Lex Machina interviewed employment litigators from top law firms and major corporations to better understand their particular use cases, and incorporated their feedback directly into the new offering.

“We’re constantly striving to innovate with new ideas and products so we can provide additional value and efficiencies to our clients,” said Chuck Baldwin, Managing Director at Ogletree Deakins, an international labor and employment law firm. “The new Employment Litigation Module from Lex Machina is a natural step in our continued direction of leveraging data-driven insights in order to better transform complex legal issues into viable business solutions.”

Among the new content added to Legal Analytics are three million docket entries and 36 employment-specific tags for damages, findings and remedies, including:

• Damages – Back pay/lost wages, emotional distress, front pay, liquidated damages, and punitive damages.
• Findings – Findings under discrimination statues such as Title VII (race/color, religion, national origin, sex/gender), ADEA (age), PDA (pregnancy), §1981/§1983 (equal rights/civil rights violations), USERRA (members of the military), the Equal Pay Act and the Rehabilitation Act. Other findings include: hostile work environment/harassment, retaliation, failure to mitigate defense, time barred defense, failure to accommodate, legitimate nondiscriminatory/non-retaliatory reason defense, and failure to exhaust administrative remedies defense.
• Remedies – Notice posting, promotion, and reinstatement.

“Federal employment cases alleging discrimination, retaliation, or harassment cut to the core of the employee-employer relationship. The stakes are high for plaintiffs and defendants,” said Owen Byrd, Chief Evangelist and General Counsel of Lex Machina. “For the first time, parties and their counsel will be able to set litigation strategy and tactics in federal employment cases based on actual events and outcomes in prior cases with similar claims.”

Initial employment litigation findings uncoverd by Lex Machina, based on cases filed between January 1, 2009 through June 30, 2017, include:

• Discrimination lawsuits are by far the most common (87% of cases), followed by retaliation (66%) and harassment (35%).
• Employment cases often involve overlapping kinds of claims – discrimination and retaliation claims are combined more than half the time (54%), and the other two combinations occur in about a third of cases.
• Cases with all three tags comprise just under a quarter of the cases (24%).
• Top governmental defendants include municipal organizations like the City of New York and the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority, as well as federal organizations like the U.S. Post Office and Department of Defense.
• Top corporations by employment cases include companies with a nationwide presence like Wal-mart, Home Depot, Target, United Parcel Service, Bank of America, and United Airlines.