Lex Machina Launches Legal Analytics for First Amendment Cases

The Lex Machina team is excited to launch expanded Legal Analytics for litigation involving claims brought pursuant to the First Amendment, Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) (the “First Amendment Cases”). Consisting of more than 40,000 cases, the First Amendment Cases give practitioners critical insights on judges, courts, law firms, attorneys, and parties involved in litigation under the relevant statutes.

This release marks the final stage in Lex Machina’s achievement of full civil rights coverage. The First Amendment Cases join the civil rights datasets already available on the platform:

• ADA (113,000+ cases);
• Police Action (79,000+ cases);
• Education (16,000+ cases);
• Fair Housing Act (9,000+ cases); and
• Voting Rights (2,000+ cases).

The First Amendment Cases bring our total civil rights cases to over 240,000 and our total federal district court cases to over 3.7 million. We are proud of this key achievement in completing our civil rights coverage.

The full civil rights dataset incorporates notable features such as filters for each subsection of cases. It also incorporates an extensive collection of practice-area specific damages, remedies, and findings. Here are a few of the findings specific to the subsets of civil rights cases offered by Lex Machina:

• First Amendment: Retaliation; Freedom of Speech Violation
• ADA: Discrimination; Retaliation
• Police Action: Excessive Force Violation; Search and Seizure Violation
• Education: Title IX Discrimination; IDEA Violation
• Fair Housing Act: Discrimination; Failure to Accommodate
• Voting Rights: Voting Rights Act Violation; 15th Amendment Violation

With the recently released First Amendment Cases, our research uncovered the following data trends for those First Amendment Cases filed between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2023:

• Five times as many cases were resolved in favor of claim defendants compared to claimants, primarily on summary judgment and judgment on the pleadings.
• The highest number of cases (2,036) was filed in the Central District of California.
• 1,123 cases went to trial in a median of 857 days.
• Total amount of compensatory damages awarded, excluding attorneys’ fees, was $53 billion.
• Courts found No Freedom of Speech Violation in 1,651 cases, and found Freedom of Speech Violation in 432 cases.

Lex Machina allows users to filter by a multitude of parameters, including the following, in order to find the most relevant cases:

Case Tags – ADA; ADA High-Volume Plaintiff; ADA: Auditory / Visual Accommodation; ADA: Mobility Accommodation; ADA: Service Animal Accommodation; ADA: Website Access Accommodation; Education; Fair Housing Act; First Amendment; Police Action; Voting

Remedies – Granted and Denied Permanent Injunction; Preliminary Injunction; Temporary Restraining Order; ADA Remediation; Non-ADA Remediation

Damages – Civil Penalties; Compensatory Damages; Nominal Damages; Punitive Damages; State Statutory Damages

Depending on your subscription, users can access the analytics on First Amendment Cases now.

To learn more, contact our sales team.