Lex Machina Enhances Patent Litigation Analytics And Microsoft Simplifies OneDrive Access
Legal technology columnist Sean Doherty shares notable news from LexisNexis and from Microsoft.
If you weren’t steeped in an early Thanksgiving tradition, you saw that LexisNexis announced the acquisition of Lex Machina on November 23.
For Lex Machina subscribers and big data enthusiasts, it’s not the end of the Silicon Valley-based data analytics provider but the awakening of legal analytics in areas beyond intellectual property, such as discrimination and employment law. Lex Machina will no longer be hampered by PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) data extraction costs. With free access to Lexis Advance case law content and PACER output from its new owner (via Court Link), the company can apply its data analytics and visualization technology at reduced costs. Whether the savings to produce products get passed on to subscribers is another story.
If you have doubts that Lex Machina will operate independently of the mother ship, check out the company’s recent news release on PTAB 2.0. After further massaging data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) on trials in the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), the LexisNexis company is offering subscribers new features to analyze PTAB case information and visualize the results.
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Besides surfacing case information on parties, judges, law firms, attorneys, patents and arguments before the PTAB, Lex Machina offers new claims-level findings about trial institution, settlement, disclaimer and ultimate patentability. The findings result from a deeper view of the data than the PTO provides on its public PTAB website, according to Karl Harris, vice president of products at Lex Machina.
Harris showed me how the PTO’s PTAB data only provides a single lead petitioner for each published case, while Lex Machina includes all petitioners and the ability to review how often law firms have succeeded instituting or blocking new trials for petitioners and how often specific judges have relied on specific areas of patent law, such as 35 U.S.C. § 103 (non-obvious patent subject), in institution or final decisions. See Figure 1.
Figure 1: Lex Machina’s Grounds filter details the statutory basis, e.g., 35 U.S.C. §§ 101, 102, 103 and 112, to deny or grant petitions and final decisions. Click to enlarge.
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Visualizations are active, allowing subscribers to drill down into the administrative staff, judges and law firms on cases and filing timelines.
Attorneys’ patent records are now accessed by drilling down into search results for the respective attorneys, not law firms. Next year, Lex Machina will enable subscribers to drill down into the law firm data to find the specific attorneys assigned to cases. See Figure 2.
Figure 2: Lex Machina data analysis on law firms handling PTAB trials for a period. Click to enlarge.
Besides adding comprehensive PTAB data analysis to district court case data and International Trade Commission decisions, Lex Machina offers visual outcomes in all PTAB matters from initial petitions to institution and final decisions across timelines. See Figure 3.
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Figure 3: Lex Machina visual data analysis of PTAB matters from initial petitions to institution and final decisions. Click to enlarge.
Patent product subscribers can conduct full-text searches of PTAB data and drill down to specific cases, documents and exhibits. In a few short weeks, the company will roll out an alert system to notify subscribers of new case analysis by PACER based on U.S. PTO’s Technology Center text and numeric categories, such as semiconductors 2800, computer architecture 2100, and biotechnology and organic chemistry 1600, which includes ANDA (Abbreviated New Drug Application) litigation and generic drug practice.
The new PTAB features are complimentary for all Lex Machina Patent subscribers. To review the full capabilities of the new PTAB functions, see the company’s PTAB data sheet and video.
MICROSOFT ONEDRIVE UPDATE
I will give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. It’s not confused with its product lines but it can confuse, such as the Redmond, Washington giant’s two OneDrive applications for personal and business use. The two applications require users to install and manage two versions of code to synchronize local files with Microsoft-managed cloud storage associate with a personal Live or Hotmail account and an Office 365 subscription for businesses and organizations.
Not everyone who subscribes to Office 365 comes to the cloud-based Office suite with an existing Microsoft account, a Live or Hotmail account, and a personal OneDrive storage account. I may be the only one on the planet. But if you’re like me and you want to maintain simultaneous desktop access to personal and business files while using Office 365, you had to install and configure two OneDrive applications.
Last week Microsoft announced a pre-release version of its OneDrive for Business synchronization client ahead of the code’s commercial release, which is expected by June 30, 2016. The pre-release version of the sync client software is a new approach to OneDrive for Business—it’s built on the OneDrive consumer code base.
If you install the pre-release code, note the product is still under development and not all advertised features are included in the code, yet. But the new code provides one app to manage and synchronize OneDrive personal and business content on Windows operating systems versions 7, 8 or 10. Windows Vista or 8.1 are not supported but support for the latter is expected in Q1 of 2016.
Before installing the new OneDrive for Business code, disconnect your current OneDrive connection and run the two .reg files: OneDriveAddAccount.reg, which allows you to add a personal OneDrive account with a business account; and previewring.reg, which enables updates to the OneDrive synch account. Then install the Windows version of the OneDrive sync client from https://oneclient.sfx.ms/Win/Preview/OneDriveSetup.exe.
Note that if you’re running the consumer version of OneDrive like me, the installer will supersede (overwrite) that version and continue to synch normally with a personal OneDrive account and synch to an Office 365 business account. See Figure 4.
Figure 4: The pre-release OneDrive application synchronizes business (blue cloud) and personal (white) OneDrive accounts to Windows 7, 8 and 10 desktops.
Although I like one management interface for the two OneDrive accounts, the pre-release code is not a multithreaded application. Still two separate processes run in memory.
Plans for the commercial release of the product include support for disk space usage parity, removing the 20,000 file count limit, and bumping up the maximum file size.
Disclosure: The author subscribes to Microsoft Office 365 for Business and maintains a Microsoft account for Live mail and OneDrive.
Earlier: LexisNexis Acquires ‘Legal Analytics’: Lex Machina
Attorney Sean Doherty has been following enterprise and legal technology for more than 15 years as a former senior technology editor for UBM Tech (formerly CMP Media) and former technology editor for Law.com and ALM Media. Sean analyzes and reviews technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments. Contact him via email at sean@laroque-doherty.net and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.
