LexisNexis Legal & Professional, a content and software provider for business and legal professionals, announced on November 23 that it acquired privately held Lex Machina Inc., a software-as-a-service provider of data analytics for patent and trademark litigation data. Lex Machina, based in Silicon Valley, will operate as a stand-alone entity in the North American Research Solutions group within LexisNexis Legal & Professional. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the value of the transaction to both companies is readily apparent.

Lex Machina creates structured data sets from public data, such as PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), to help lawyers predict the outcomes of different legal strategies by mining, tagging, categorizing and enhancing millions of federal court dockets and documents. The technology allows lawyers to make data-driven decisions and develop litigation strategies from data on case law, parties and counsels, jurisdictions and presiding judges. From historical case law and docket information, Lex Machina subscribers can predict the most favorable jurisdictions to bring cases, glean the most successful motions and arguments before judges, and sleuth opposing counsel strategies from prior cases. (For more about how Lex Machina works, see my fellow columnist Zach Abramowitz’s conversation with Owen Byrd, the chief evangelist and general counsel of Lex Machina.)

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