Quickly evaluate product liability case value and viability

Product liability cases can be complicated, expensive and time-consuming. But now, working up cases can be more efficient. Designed by and for practitioners, the new Lexis Product Liability Navigator™ tool helps attorneys and researchers assess the validity, value and potential risk of a case, obtain critical information and insights across all LexisNexis® content, and formulate case strategies while reducing research hours spent on case preparation.

Now you can conduct all your product liability research in one, powerful place with Lexis Product Liability Navigator.

Designed by and for product liability practitioners

This toolset is the second in the Navigator franchise from LexisNexis, joining the previously released Lexis Medical Navigator® service. These solutions for complex forms of litigation are designed to complement the way lawyers and research professionals work and significantly reduce the time it takes them to deliver the insights and information they need.

To help ensure the Lexis Product Liability Navigator tool would fit practitioner workflow, the product team reached out to more than 300 product liability practitioners. The goal was to deeply understand how they work, what is important to them and what they need to make critical case decisions. At multiple points, practitioners were actually brought into the design process. The end result is a product built by and for product liability practitioners.

The home page: a simple new entry point to complex research

The Lexis Product Liability Navigator home page demonstrates the commitment to practitioner feedback. The traditional single open search box is replaced with segmented search fields: Product Type, Product Name, Manufacturer and Jurisdiction. You can enter information in one of those fields or all of them, and Lexis Product Liability Navigator will craft multiple searches to show you the most relevant information across LexisNexis® resources.




Product Overview dashboard

The terms you enter on the home page will populate the Product Overview dashboard. It presents you with the regulations, recalls and reports, multidistrict litigation, verdicts and settlements, cases, and experts for your product and jurisdiction. The Lexis Product Liability Navigator team sorted through all LexisNexis content and brought in only the information most important to product liability practitioners for this dashboard—not just high-level content types, but also individual sources within those content types.

Behind the scenes, searches entered on the home page trigger multifaceted search algorithms optimized to each separate grouping of sources to surface the most relevant information possible. The end result is a Product Overview dashboard that connects the dots to show whether the case you are looking at has potential and how much it might be worth.

Drilling deeper into the specifics of your case

In addition to optimized search algorithms on the landing page, Lexis Product Liability Navigator offers multiple ways to refine your research.

The left side of the Product Overview dashboard offers unique filters for your product under Theories of Liabilities, Affirmative Defenses and Injuries. These filters help you tailor your research to be as much like your case or prospective case as possible.

Practitioners often tell us how critical expert witnesses are to a product liability case, especially experts who have proven legal experience with the product at issue. As a result, Lexis Product Liability Navigator offers a way to give users that level of specificity with 400,000+ expert witnesses. This solution takes the terms entered on the home page, searches the product information in the LexisNexis verdicts and settlement library of more than 1 million documents, and then extracts the experts that appear in those results. Now, you can go beyond looking at an automotive engineer, for example, and find experts with experience in Honda Odyssey seat belt design defects. This gives you a powerful advantage for your evaluation and workup.

The Product Overview dashboard even displays the top five expert results and the number of matching verdicts and settlements on file in connection with those individuals. Selecting any of these results takes you right to the Context profiles for those experts.

For deep content-specific research, you can click any of the “tiles” on the Product Overview dashboard or any corresponding tab at the top of the screen and open a results list that brings in the Lexis Advance® experience. From there you can review or download documents—or refine further by searching within the results or applying post-search filters, just as you would using the Lexis Advance service.

Finally, you can download this comprehensive information in a report to share, print or access offline as needed.

Sneak peek: “no-fail searching”

Later this summer, a unique “no-fail searching” feature that automates complex searches for better results will be added to the Lexis Product Liability Navigator tool. If one or more content types yield zero search results—due to the granularity of search terms—the dashboard’s no-fail search feature will drop the lowest-scoring search term and re-run the search until results can be found or until zero is the best result. This feature will automate the same processes attorneys or researchers would perform multiple times across multiple content types, helping to save time, eliminate frustration and expedite insight.

To learn more, contact your LexisNexis® representative or visit the Lexis Product Liability Navigator page.

LexisNexis, Lexis Advance, Lexis Medial Navigator and the Knowledge Burst logo are registered trademarks and Lexis Product Liability Navigator is a trademark of RELX Inc. Other products or services may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.