Reed Elsevier Lexis Nexis Embraces Legal Analytics: No, Not an Oxymoron
November 27, 2015
Lawyers and legal search and content processing systems do words. The analytics part of life, based on my limited experience of watching attorneys do mathy stuff, is not these folks’ core competency. Words. Oh, and billing. I can’t overlook billing.
I read “Now It’s Official: Lexis Nexis Acquires Lex Machina.” This is good news for the stakeholders of Lex Machina. Reed Elsevier certainly expects Lex Machina’s business processes to deliver an avalanche of high margin revenue. One can only raise prices so far before the old chestnut from Economics 101 kicks in: Price elasticity. Once something is too expensive, the customers kick the habit, find an alternative, or innovate in remarkable ways.
According to the write up:
LexisNexis today announced the acquisition of Silicon Valley-based Lex Machina, creators of the award-winning Legal Analytics platform that helps law firms and companies excel in the business and practice of law.
So what does legal analytics do? Here’s the official explanation, which is in, gentle reader, words:
- A look into the near future. The integration of Lex Machina Legal Analytics with the deep collection of LexisNexis content and technology will unleash the creation of new, innovative solutions to help predict the results of legal strategies for all areas of the law.
- Industry narrative. The acquisition is a prominent and fresh example of how a major player in legal technology and publishing is investing in analytics capabilities.
I don’t exactly know what Lex Machina delivers. The company’s Web page states:
We mine litigation data, revealing insights never before available about judges, lawyers, parties, and patents, culled from millions of pages of IP litigation information. We call these insights Legal Analytics, because analytics involves the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Our customers use to win in the highly competitive business and practice of law. Corporate counsel use Lex Machina to select and manage outside counsel, increase IP value and income, protect company assets, and compare performance with competitors. Law firm attorneys and their staff use Lex Machina to pitch and land new clients, win IP lawsuits, close transactions, and prosecute new patents.
I think I understand. Lex Machina applies the systems and methods used for decades by companies like BAE Systems (Detica/ NetReveal) and similar firms to provide tools which identify important items. (BAE was one of Autonomy’s early customers back in the late 1990s.) Algorithms, not humans reading documents in banker boxes, find the good stuff. Costs go down because software is less expensive than real legal eagles. Partners can review outputs and even visualizations. Revolutionary.
I suppose Lex Machina is at the cutting edge of analytics like the Google and In-Q-Tel funded Recorded Future. These are my assumptions, but my hunch is that the reality of crunching data for “a paradigm shift for lawyers” may lag what’s been happening in the intelligence analytics world for a decade or so. Again, this is just my hunch based on the mathiness of legal eagles.
Reed Elsevier does need some winners. Google Finance shows:
The Reed Elsevier top line is gently drifting down, and the net income is flat. It is a credit to the company’s pricing and cost control methods that the financial graph looks as good as it does.
I know the top 25 law firms are into paradigm shifts. I marvel at the case example of Dewey & LeBoeuf. Lawyers and math. Exciting. What happens if algorithmic drift creeps in? “What’s algorithmic drift?” responds a legal eagle. There you go.
Stephen E Arnold,
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