On Friday, the company Lemley founded in 2010 — first as an academic project called Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse, which later turned into the for-profit Lex Machina — was bought by LexisNexis on undisclosed terms.

Lex Machina mines information about lawyers, judges and parties in patent and other intellectual property cases and uses a data analytics platform to provide insights on case strategy.

Lemley explained that earlier this year, the company decided it wants to branch out and provide data analytics in new areas of litigation such as bankruptcy, labor and employment and securities.

In order to do so, the company needed to expand the body of case law in its system, but obtaining all U.S. civil case filings since 2000 would require an enormous capital outlay — at 10 cents per page using Pacer, an internal analysis pegged the cost of such a project at approximately $10 million, he said.

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While neither LexisNexis nor Lex Machina disclosed the financial structure of the deal, Big Law Business earlier reported that Lex Machina was looking to be bought for between $30 and $35 million, with annual revenues of between $5 and $8 million. And Lemley suggested that the terms in the transaction agreement with LexisNexis came pretty close to that.

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David Perla, President of Bloomberg Law, said he doesn’t see the transaction as a “harbinger” of more deals to come in analytics or legal technology generally. He said that data analytic startups in the legal space still haven’t proven themselves as sustainable growth businesses.

“From an industry standpoint, it’s little more than an affirmation that analytics broadly and analytics in the litigation context are an important part of the future for legal,” said Perla.

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