How Much Longer? Lex Machina Introduces Event-to-Event Timing Analytics

One litigator is looking ahead to trial after a summary judgment ruling leaves key claims in play. Another has just finished a patent claim construction hearing and needs to know when the court might issue its order. Both face familiar questions from their clients: How much longer? For each lawyer, the most useful timing insights start with the milestone the case has just reached. 

Lex Machina®, the LexisNexis® Legal Analytics® platform, helps legal professionals understand how litigation unfolds through powerful analytics and exclusive insights on case outcomes, findings, damage awards, equitable remedies, timing, appeals, and more for millions of commercially relevant lawsuits in the United States. New enhanced event-to-event timing analytics give users greater flexibility to analyze federal district court timelines. In addition to measuring from case filing, users can customize their starting point by selecting another procedural milestone and examining how long cases took to reach subsequent events. 

Key Takeaways 

• Customize where the clock starts. Examine timing between procedural milestones in relevant cases before a particular judge, including from summary judgment decisions to trial. 

• Explore meaningful event sequences and review the underlying cases that match the timing question. 

• Use those insights to support litigation budgets, settlement discussions, client expectations, and law firm pitches. 

Better Budgets, Pitches, and Client Conversations 

“It’s really about budgeting and setting expectations,” said Kristal Mendoza-Bautista, a product manager for Lex Machina. Enhanced timing analytics from Lex Machina enable legal professionals to have “more informed conversations with their clients.” 

Timing insights can give legal professionals a stronger factual basis for discussing resource needs and explaining why a budget may need to change. As a case progresses, teams can return to the data with a more focused question about the work ahead. 

• Support budget requests. Combine the observed timing of relevant cases with anticipated work, billing rates, and resource needs to explain when spending may occur and why additional funding may be needed. 

• Plan settlement discussions. Consider the likely duration of the next phase alongside its anticipated cost, the client’s financial priorities, and the risks of continued litigation. 

• Improve client updates. Explain how comparable cases progressed after the same milestone and use those observations to revisit expectations as the matter develops. 

• Strengthen business development. Bring insights about cases similar to a prospective client’s dispute into the conversation, showing how the firm uses data to inform its proposed strategy and budget. 

Historical patterns support planning alongside the court’s schedule and the circumstances of the particular case. 

Customer Questions Set the Direction 

The enhancement grew out of questions customers had been asking for years. Existing timing analytics helped legal professionals understand how long cases took to reach key events from case filing. But clients and their counsel also wanted to understand what happened after a case reached a later milestone. 

In a conversation about the development process, Mendoza-Bautista explained that the team responded to customers’ requests for the ability to tailor timing analysis to a particular point in litigation. 

“They want to customize where the clock would start,” Mendoza-Bautista said. “Our users are really interested to know what happens next after a certain point in litigation. And that is not always at case filing.” 

Those questions also arose during customer demonstrations. A lawyer whose case has already progressed through pleading or summary judgment needs information that helps explain the next phase. Giving users control over the starting event makes the analysis more responsive to that need. 

How Does Event-to-Event Timing Work? 

Within Lex Machina, customers can select a supported starting event and explore the subsequent milestones relevant to their analysis. The enhancement also adds five timing events to the milestones already available in the product.

That flexibility allows the starting point to change with the question. An attorney assessing a newly filed lawsuit may want to understand the overall path to trial. Later, the same attorney may need to understand how long cases took to reach trial after a summary judgment decision. 

The timing view presents case counts, median elapsed times, and charts showing the distribution of observed timelines. Together, these help users see how closely cases cluster around a typical duration and how widely their timelines vary. 

Connecting Events and the Cases Behind Them 

Users can explore timing between relevant milestones and click a case count to review the underlying cases. That context helps counsel assess how well the historical timelines fit the circumstances of their own matters. 

Event-to-event timing analytics help counsel connect the current stage of a case to the strategic decisions ahead. With precision and confidence, professionals with Lex Machina understand how long a given matter might reasonably be expected to take, given what has already occurred. 

Examples include: 

• Summary judgment decisions to trial. After a case survives summary judgment, counsel can examine how long relevant cases before the assigned judge took to reach trial. That interval helps trial teams plan witness preparation, secure expert availability, and coordinate staffing for the final push. 

• Defendants’ answers to decisions on motions for permanent injunctions. The interval from an answer to a judge’s ruling on a permanent injunction helps counsel frame the duration of uncertainty for a business client. Historical timelines can inform contingency planning for operations that the requested order could affect. 

• Patent claim construction hearings to claim construction orders. Patent counsel can assess how long a judge typically took to issue an order after a claim construction hearing. The results help teams sequence infringement and validity analysis around a ruling that will define the disputed claim terms. 

• FLSA conditional certification to court-approved class action settlement. In matters involving Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) collective claims and related class claims, counsel can measure the time from conditional certification to an approved class action settlement. Those timelines help negotiators assess proposed resolution schedules, including the time needed to secure court approval. 

Explore Event-to-Event Timing Analytics with Lex Machina 

Request a Lex Machina demonstration to see how measuring time between procedural milestones can help your team plan for what comes next.