The Value of Moving from Intuition-Based Decisions to Evidence-Based Planning in High-Stakes Litigation

Welcome to Reinventing Professionals, a podcast hosted by industry analyst Ari Kaplan, which shares ideas, guidance, and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation of legal and professional services This is Ari Kaplan and I'm speaking today with Adam Marick, a lawyer epidemiologist, and the legal marketing manager for Lex Machina, the LexiNexis legal Analytics platform. Hi Adam, how are you? I am doing great, I'm doing really well looking forward to this conversation.

So tell us about your background and your role at Lex Machina. I've been a lawyer licensed in Georgia for 16 years. As you mentioned, an interesting fact about me is that I'm also an epidemiologist by training, I was a math major in college, so I'm really lucky that I get to combine my backgrounds in my role as the leader for content marketing and thought leadership for Lex Machina, which is the Lexi Nexus legal analytics platform, something like Freakonomics or Moneyball for civil litigation.

If you think about a patient who goes to their doctor and gets a diagnosis that they weren't really expecting, what's the first thing that person is probably gonna ask their doctor? Is it Doc? Can you tell me? The neat phrases in old Latin that you learned in graduate school that might describe this situation.

Probably not. They're gonna want to know the prognosis. What does this mean in the end? How long is it gonna take till I get better?

What's this gonna cost me? Should I go with this specialist? With that one? are much the same way when it comes to their lawyers and legal problems but it's an area in which legal professionals have historical struggled and not just like a little bit.

So that's where Lex Machina comes in. We're a software as a service that has a sizable internal team of legal professionals, data scientists and software engineers, and we work together to collect and maintain a huge dynamic collection of not just data and graphs for lawsuits throughout federal courts and a growing variety of hundreds of state courts, but also collecting the underlying dockets and documents themselves. So that we can give our customers complete information about what actually happened at the end of the day in millions of lawsuits, for any case that might interest you or an adjuster or another professional, you can quickly and easily tell who won how much money they won by what procedural means, under what findings of fact, how long it took.

federal court cases, whether it survived appeal and more, plus the kind of experience metrics you might find like on the back of a sports card, but as they pertain to each of the attorneys, law firms, companies, and judges involved in each case. So for legal professionals, this allows them to make data informed recommendations for their cases and clients for which venue to select. To, for which motion arguments to emphasize or whether to file a certain motion at all. How to negotiate smart settlements and form the right trial tactics, but also for business development analytics.

Allow a private office to showcase their own history of success and for companies and their general counsel legal analytics from Lex Machina, help them assess liability risk and pick the right outside. Litigation counsel. With confidence and precision . What major shifts are you seeing in how litigation's evolving, particularly in complex high stakes disputes?

The short answer is that there's more complex litigation, both in terms of the raw number of filings and also the stakes tending to be higher in each of those cases. Civil defense lawyers and property and casualty insurance carriers have complained about. A perpetually ongoing lawsuit crisis since literally the 1830s. That said this decade especially since COVID-19 pandemic business closures have reopened, there's been more data and literature out there surfacing that have lent more legitimacy to the notion that damage awards have gotten higher, like beyond inflation, especially jury verdicts.

When you compare total value of jury verdicts and average values. They're rising beyond inflationary rates as well as compared to rates for judge order damages for federal civil litigation in the United States. There was an annual record set in 2023 for total damage awards as well as average damage awards. Per case, and then that record was broken again in 2024 and 2025.

It's not just averages in totals, it's the median damage award too. The median damage award in federal courts for the 2021 through 2025 period was about 20% higher than the median damage award for the proceeding five year period. In most businesses and litigations the same way, success tends to beget success as more plaintiffs are coming away from their lawsuits compensated. They're establishing these models for damages in similar cases thereafter.

so as you would expect with incentives, we're seeing an increase. We've seen a big year over year jumps many. But not all categories of complex civil litigation. for particular examples, as we reported in this Trade Secrets report, claims for misappropriation of trade secrets are up as are failure to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities.

Those lawsuits are up disputes related to commercial liability insurance policies. Infringement of pharmaceutical and computer patents, federal Tort Claims Act cases, and others are all going up in recent years. There's a couple proposed reasons for this that kind of get brought up. one is the rise of the litigation funding industry.

there are companies that will finance the way for plaintiffs to pay expert costs and other costs associated with their lawsuits, so that cases that previously weren't making it to trial are increasingly now doing so. There's more and more attorney advertising. It's not just billboards and more of them taken up with lawyer space. Lawyers are also advertising on your phone, on TikTok, on Instagram and whatnot.

And so this is just more exposure for other potential future plaintiffs to c rewards or awards they could obtain. then people think there's also been a little bit of a change. In terms of strategy for the plaintiff's bar, this idea of the reptile theory that's gotten really big in plaintiff's personal injury cases, especially in the last 15 years. That is emphasizing less, more the plaintiff's injuries and more the defendant's quote unquote reprehensible conduct and making an example out of them.

But. is complex. Litigation is up, and we're not really seeing reasons to think that trend is abating in the near term. To Lex Muck in his most recent trade secret litigation report, what's making trade secret disputes such a central issue right now?

As in trade secret disputes and a few other varieties of complex litigation, general macroeconomic conditions are a big part of it in terms of inflation and shifting labor markets. Inflationary pressures have. Coincided with lawsuits that assert claims for more money. And when the amount in controversy for claims goes up, they're more likely to reach litigation and more likely to reach federal courts where, Jurisdiction over certain state law claims more or less requires there be diversity of citizenship between the parties and more than 75,000 to be the amount in controversy.

Then there's the shifting labor markets. The typical story of a trade secret misappropriation case nowadays is one of a departing employee who takes the information or things with them that they perhaps weren't supposed to. Those situations generally don't happen. And staple happy employment relationships they happen when people get laid off or a worker feels uncomfortable with their current position and needs to move elsewhere.

2025 was an especially bad year that. In terms of shifts in labor markets, in technology and service sectors throughout the country. Last year we saw big year over year jumps in consumer collection lawsuits and employment disputes in federal courts and most state courts. Besides economic factors, there's also technological ones.

is a big part of this story as it is in many circumstances. These days, AI has made it easier for companies to monitor for and pinpoint their breaches of trade secrets that occur, also they make companies more sensitive to their secrets getting out. Imagine for example, if Coca-Cola's secret formula. Ended up in a chat GPT query and was part of a public LLM, would really be no protection for Coca-Cola in that circumstance as it is a trade secret that they may have perhaps failed to, properly secure.

the sort of thing that keeps a lot of company executives up at night nowadays. And then as mentioned earlier, success tends to beget success in litigation. see several heavy repeat plaintiffs. In federal trade secret lawsuits.

And so as those companies have developed experience and models for outcomes in terms of private enforcement for trade secret thefts, they're more willing and able to do it again in similar circumstances later. How Flexima, help lawyers move from intuition based decisions to evidence-based planning in high stakes cases. Lex Machina makes it easy lawyers to implement strategies that are supported by data for litigation and business development, but we're careful not to purport to predict the future an infinite amount of variables involved in each and every lawsuit, and each of the judges, lawyers, parties, and witness involved will each theoretically have their own free will, but analytics are frequently just.

What the doctor ordered. Those times you reach a fork in the road in a lawsuit. If you're on the plaintiff's side, you might ask, does it make more sense for us to file in allowable court number one, or allowable court number two, or if we're on the defense side, does it make sense to remove or transfer essentially this state court lawsuit to federal court for allowed? I, for several years worked as an insurance defense and coverage attorney in the Atlanta area and the standard advice.

That we tended to offer clients was that they wanna remove their state court lawsuits to federal courts the reason, as most lawyers are taught in their first year in law school as a fairness mechanism and to reduce the chances for home cooking, as they called it. When I. Went to school down south. But as that true, the answer is it depends like most other legal questions, and the good news is for the depends.

You don't have to be a math major to figure it out or hire a third party consultant. You can just simply look up the numbers between these two jurisdictions and compare their outcomes in terms of case timing and trial resolutions or motion metrics. So in my circumstance, when I was a lawyer in Atlanta, everyone assumed that the federal court judges were more likely to grant a defense motion for summary judgment or a motion for judgment on the pleadings with the thinking that these federal court judges don't want this state court r raff in their court.

you can just look at the numbers and see that's not the case. It's the same in other areas too, in other areas. It's not, it just depends on the situation. You don't have to just rely on gut feel for that sort of thing anymore.

How do you see litigation Analytics evolving? I see litigation evolving into include more cases, so that includes more state coverage, and also that becomes more of an intricate part of large language models. those based in legal research engines like Lexus Plus with protege. remember in God we trust all of this, bring data.

We also expect analytics to evolve in terms of increasing in adoption. main goal, I think for most civil litigation attorneys and insurance representatives. This year should simply be to train that issue spotting light bulb in your head to light up. Those times that data can add value to a dispute resolution process.

Sometimes that's really obvious. Someone might explicitly ask a numbers based question, like, how long will it take the judge to rule on our motion? Or how likely is a defense verdict at trial? But other times it's more implicit.

Think about those, pardon the interruption emails. That you might get at your office or on your professional, group lift serve. be something like PTI can anyone with experience before Judge Smith, tell me about them. Do they suggest the pro plaintiff proclivity, are they willing to grant this type of motion?

I sent those kind of emails out when I was practicing, I would typically get one or two responses from like a. Semi-retired lawyer who would tell me a mildly funny anecdote regarding them and the judge of interest from some time ago. And that's not irrelevant. It's not unhelpful, but it's not data, right?

And with analytics, you have data to inform decision making. It compliments that anecdote, if you will, which is just based on personal experience and whatever you hear through the grapevine. This. Kaplan speaking with Adam Marick, a lawyer epidemiologist, and the legal marketing manager for Lex Machina, the LexiNexis legal analytics platform.

Adam, thanks so much. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to the Reinventing Professionals podcast.

Visit reinventingprofessionals.com or arikaplanadvisors.