Starting about five years ago, LexisNexis began reinventing its technology stack, and in the time since, has undergone a series of technology developments and company acquisitions to adopt to the changing nature of laws.

Among those acquisitions was that of Lex Machina, a company that started as a Stanford University project and has since grown into a popular analytics suite. Over the past year, the company has engaged in an effort to expand its technology into all areas of federal practice, and on June 20, it announced its expansion into commercial litigation.

As noted in a release announcing the expansion, new features to the platform also include:

· More damages categories: This primarily covers commercial cases, such as contract and punitive damages.

· An expansion of case timing analytics: The platform has added time to permanent injunction and summary judgement.

· New tags: Focusing on contract defense, unjust enrichment, contract breaches, rescission, and termination.

Litigation is one of those arenas that is increasingly proving ripe for analytics technology, and Lex Machina CEO Josh Becker in a statement billed the foray into commercial litigation as its “biggest most ambitious endeavor yet.” The company also noted that among the 62,000 plus commercial cases filed since 2009, 57 percent included a business tort claim and 80 percent a breach of contract claim.

Further, the extension also takes aim at what Lex Machina CTO Karl Harris referred to in a statement as “PACER coding shortcomings,” i.e. the ways in in which “commercial” cases are defined. For example, Lex Machina claimed that about a quarter of commercial cases are defined as securities, antitrust, and intellectual property cases, respectively.

This coding, Harris said, has been “a major obstacle for attorneys who are trying to get an accurate and comprehensive view of commercial litigation.”

Lex Machina’s first step in its extension into all federal practice areas was announced in July 2016 with securities law, followed in November by antitrust law. The company plans to also expand into product liability, commercial bankruptcy, commercial product liability, and labor and employment. Lex Machina legal data scientist Brian Howard previously noted that after federal practice areas, the company will extend to state practice areas.

LexisNexis as a whole has been making more strides in the analytics field as well. In January 2017, the company made available to Lexis Advance users metrics from Lex Machina’s Legal Analytics platform. Earlier this month, LexisNexis acquired Ravel Law, which will be integrated into Lexis Advance and the Lexis Litigation Profile Suite. In 2016, the company acquired Intelligize, an SEC intelligence provider.

Analytics is gaining popularity among big players in legal technology. In October 2016, Bloomberg Law released its own Litigation Analytics solution. Darby Green, commercial product director for Bloomberg Law, previously told LTN that the platform was aimed at a broad audience “whose work involves some aspect of litigation,” including general counsel, litigators, law firm marketers and business development staff, and librarians. “In many ways, it does a disservice to compare us to niche players like Lex Machina: We seek to service a much broader base of users,” she noted.

Likewise, startup Justly released an analytics platform that compiles data from federal and state court data to help legal business professionals get a clearer picture of potential legal spend, which founder Laurent Wiesel described as “competitive because of the breadth of our data, and that is a central challenge of any legal technology business like ours.”

Lex Machina’s sale to LexisNexis, he added, “was motivated in part by their decision to not try to scale the data on their own.”

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