A Big Change in the ANDA Litigation Paradigm: Lex Machina’s Legal Analytics

EDITORIAL NOTE: On September 30, 2014, Steve Moore will participate in a webcast with Omar Jabri, Senior Patent Counsel, Global Intellectual Property, at Apotex, and Owen Byrd, General Counsel of Lex Machina, on the new ANDA-specific capabilities of Lex Machina’s Legal Analytics platform. You can CLICK HERE to register for the webcast.

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Lex Machina (emphasize the “Mach” followed by “ina”) is a legal technology platform that emerged from a collaboration between experts at Stanford’s Computer Science Department and Law School.  Every day, Lex Machina captures data from PACER, the ITC’s EDIS system and the USPTO website.  This data is cleansed, coded and tagged, using a proprietary natural language processing and machine learning engine, to provide information about districts, judges, attorneys, law firms and parties, as well as asserted patents.  It also sets out in an easy format the outcomes of each case.  The tool allows one to search briefs, motions, orders, and every other type of filing made in a litigation by judge, court, attorney etc.   As an early adopter, I have seen this product move from a useful information source that provided me information that supplemented standard research tools, to a tool that I now find indispensible to my practice.

I started in patent litigation 25 years ago.  At that time, the best analytics available to any patent litigator was to walk up and down the hallway seeking out attorneys who may have had a case before a particular judge or against an opposing party or counsel. Much of the information we relayed to our clients was often little more than conjecture, based on the feelings of the person whom we communicated with, and the necessary supposition we had to make that a judge today would react as he or she had 10 years earlier.  Likewise, we often relayed information to our clients about opposing counsel based on the premise that the particular attorney we were facing would act more in line with reputation of their firms, then as they may actually act as an individual attorney. Out of necessity, we often made the leap that a judge viewed all patent cases as the same, and that they resolved a motion in an electrical case in a similar manner as they resolved the same in an ANDA litigation.

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When Lex Machina first came out it provided easy-to-view analytics related to how judges and courts typically ruled on motions over a long period of time.  One could easily determine average times to key events in the litigation dance, and, most importantly, look at how patents typically fared in front of the court as a whole.  This information was particularly useful for determining where among several possible jurisdictions a case might most advantageously be brought.  As time went on, Lex Machina became even more powerful, allowing one to search through all motions and filings made in front of a judge, look at the litigation history of a patent that had been asserted (including the damages awarded) and determine how litigious parties had been in the past.  Information on law firms and their attorneys was also quickly synthesized. Custom alerts were later added, allowing one to get personalized emails and alerts about the cases and events.  Then ITC analytics was added to allow for searches across every available document in an ITC Section 337 investigation.

This year, Lex Machina has outdone itself, in allowing the very thing that ANDA lawyers desired all along – topic-specific searching.  For those of you that do ANDA litigation, as well as other types of patent litigation, you know that ANDA litigation is very different.  How a judge reacts to a particular motion in ANDA litigation is not necessarily how he or she might deal with the same motion in an electrical, mechanical or software case.  Because of this substantial difference, Lex Machina decided to separately tag over 2,500 ANDA cases filed since January 1, 2000. Thus, for the first time, litigators can make decisions based solely on reviewing the ANDA cases that a specific judge has handled.

On September 30th, our webcast will show the power this ANDA data set.  Omar Jabri will explain how he employs the data to evaluate potential outside counsel. I will explain how I use the data to pitch ANDA litigation work.  We will both demonstrate how this new pharma-specific data can be used to set case budgets, evaluate settlement, inform motion practice, increase the odds of a favorable outcome, and reduce the costs of litigation. CLICK HERE to sign up for the webcast.

I now cannot imagine practicing patent litigation without Legal Analytics supplementing traditional legal research and reasoning. I love this tool, and recommend that you attend.

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One comment so far.

  • [Avatar for pipa]
    pipa
    December 17, 2014 03:30 pm

    If it looks like its being done by actors, then it is being done by actors badly.
    In court, the judge raises his glasses and peers down at her dress and shirt, but thinks maybe he shouldn’t say anything right then. Jaguars have dots inside their rosettes while Leopards do not.