By: Justin Brownstone and Greg Selbo Law firms must continually seek more innovative strategies and tactical ideas to attract and retain clients in order to thrive in today’s increasingly competitive...
Lex Machina is proud to announce the release of enhancements to Litigation Footprint, a feature that offers an impressively broad range of party litigation data and that can combine searches across state...
Now, let’s take a deeper look at the commercial cases. These cases are incredibly valuable to litigators. Our analytics allow you to look into what is going on in business disputes, who’s...
What is your name and position at Lex Machina? Also, can you provide us with some of your background? Karen: My name is Karen Chadwick, and I am the Lex Machina Legal Data Expert for Commercial Law....
Lex Machina is proud to release its 2024 Trade Secret Litigation Report, which provides insights into trade secret litigation trends in federal district court and appellate court over the three-year period...
What is your name and position at Lex Machina? Also, can you provide us with some of your background?
Karen: My name is Karen Chadwick, and I am the Lex Machina Legal Data Expert for Commercial Law. Prior to working at Lex Machina, I served as in-house counsel for a major automotive supplier in Michigan. Also, I worked for a major law firm in Detroit.
Can you tell us more about the contracts module in Lex Machina?
Karen: There are more than 200,000 cases in the contracts module. The contracts module is very cool, because you can neatly divide it into two segments. First, it contains commercial cases and you can access these types of cases by applying the commercial case tag.
Approximately 131,000 of the contract cases are commercial cases. Commercial cases are disputes between business entities that involve a breach of contract allegation and/or a business tort allegation. Business torts are economic torts like fraud, conversion and defamation.
The other roughly 72,000 cases are non-commercial cases. Non-commercial cases are cases that involve a dispute between parties, and at least one of the parties is a non-business entity. A non-commercial case has to have a breach of contract allegation.
The contracts module, similar to all of the modules on Lex Machina, allows you to sort through the data using case tags. We have the following contracts case tags: commercial, breach of contract, business tort, negotiable instrument, franchise agreement, and non-compete. Also, it is worth mentioning that our non-compete case tag is our newest case tag!
Let’s apply the non-compete case tag.
You can see there are more than 10,000 non-compete cases (i.e., a case about a dispute over a non-competition agreement).
This case tag is particularly timely because the Federal Trade Commission recently enacted a rule that would prohibit non-compete agreements. This rule was supposed to take effect in September 2024, but a District Court in Texas held the rule-making authority of the Federal Trade Commission does not extend to this type of rule. This is probably not the end of this rule, and it will likely go to appeals court.
Also, we can see that litigation on non-competes in district courts has been relatively steady in the last 10 years. More so, if we wanted to know who wins these types of cases, then we could check out case resolution analytics.
Most of these types of cases end up settling. Claimants win 16% of the time. However, they usually win pursuant to a consent judgment. The claim defendant does not win as often as the claimant, but summary judgment is the phase of litigation where they typically win.
Additionally, if you want to access these non-compete agreements, then you can check out our case list section. For example, you can click on the subset of cases where the claimant won at summary judgment. Within each case, you can check out the non-competes, who the parties were in the disputes, the content of the dispute, whether the content was valid, etc…