Lex Machina vs Trellis: Legal Analytics Pricing, Coverage and Which to Buy

Lex Machina and Trellis are both litigation analytics products, and they answer different questions. Lex Machina is the LexisNexis federal analytics platform: deep coverage of US district and appellate civil litigation, sold by quote, with no published price and no published trial. Trellis is a state trial court platform: it covers the county courthouses where most American civil cases actually sit, and it is one of the very few vendors in this market that publishes a rate card at all. If your cases are in federal court, the comparison is short. If they are in state court, it is shorter.

Almost every roundup of these two treats them as rivals scored on the same scale. They are not really competing. They are covering different halves of the American court system, and the half your practice lives in decides the answer before any feature list does. What follows uses what each vendor publishes, checked against the vendors' own servers, and flags clearly where a number is dated or reported rather than current. It is informational research guidance, not legal advice.

Lex Machina vs Trellis at a glance

The two rows that decide most purchases are court coverage and geographic scope. Everything else is negotiable or learnable.

What is the difference between Lex Machina and Trellis?

Lex Machina is federal-first. It grew out of a Stanford research project that set out to answer an empirical question about patent litigation, and the federal docket is where its data model was built. Trellis is state-first, and it exists because the state trial court record was, and largely still is, the least accessible body of litigation data in the country. Federal filings run through one electronic system. State trial courts run through roughly three thousand county clerks with their own formats, their own portals and their own ideas about what belongs on the internet.

That difference explains the pricing structures. Federal data is comparatively uniform, so Lex Machina sells a national seat. State data has to be acquired county by county, so Trellis sells you one state at a time and meters how much of it you pull. Neither choice is arbitrary and neither is a trick.

How much does Lex Machina cost?

LexisNexis does not say, and there is now no page where it could. Checked on 23 August 2026, lexmachina.com answers HTTP 308 on every path we requested, including the pricing path, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and a URL that never existed, and forwards all of it to a single LexisNexis product page. A 308 on a path that was never published is a catch-all forwarding rule rather than a page-by-page cleanup, which is how you can tell the old site is not merely reorganized but retired. The product itself is still running under its own brand on a subdomain, where the sign-in page returns HTTP 200 and hands authentication to LexisNexis. We wrote up the whole evidence trail, including where the login actually lives, on the Lex Machina platform page.

Practically, this means Lex Machina is a quote. It is commonly sold as a module alongside a Lexis+ subscription, priced per seat on an annual term, and the number you are offered depends on firm size, practice area and how much of the LexisNexis stack you already buy. Any specific per-seat figure you find online for Lex Machina is somebody's negotiated deal repeated third hand. Treat it as gossip, not as a rate.

There is one useful consequence of the quote model: bundling is the lever. If you already pay LexisNexis, analytics is a line item in a renewal you are having anyway, and the discount lives in the term length rather than the list price.

How much does Trellis cost?

Trellis publishes a rate card, which in this market is close to remarkable. At our first-party check on 5 August 2026 the published tiers were a Personal plan at 69.95 dollars per month or 649.95 per year, a Research plan at 129.95 per month or 1,099.95 per year, and Research with Judge Analytics at 199.95 per month or 1,999.95 per year. The archived copy of the plans page corroborates both annual figures exactly, at 1,099.95 and 1,999.95, and shows a 14 day free trial on the paid tiers, with firms and corporations routed to a contact form instead.

Two qualifications matter more than the headline numbers. First, every tier is a single state. If you litigate in three states you are buying three subscriptions, and the published rate stops being the relevant number. Second, the plans are metered by annual content views, in the low hundreds on the lower tiers, so heavy docket pulling can exhaust an allowance well before the year ends. Ask what a view is counted as before you sign, because that definition, not the monthly price, determines what the thing costs you.

We should be straightforward that trellis.law blocks automated requests: a plain browser request to its pricing page returns HTTP 403 from Cloudflare, so these figures come from our own dated checks and the public archive rather than from a live read today. Confirm the current rate with the vendor before you budget against it.

Does Lex Machina cover state courts?

Partly, and the qualifier is the whole answer. Lex Machina has expanded into state litigation and reports coverage of 100 or more enhanced state courts, with thinner data across a wider set. Trellis covers 43 states plus the District of Columbia at the trial court level. Enhanced coverage of a hundred courts and trial court coverage of forty three states are not the same claim, and a vendor demo will not volunteer the difference.

The only reliable way to test this is to bring your own venues. Write down the five courts you actually file in, by county, and ask each vendor to run a real query in each one during the trial. Coverage maps are marketing. A judge in your county with three years of ruling history behind them is the product.

Which one should you buy?

• You litigate in federal court, especially IP, antitrust or securities. Lex Machina, and it is not close. That is the dataset it was built on and the analytics are correspondingly deeper.
• You are a plaintiff side or insurance defense firm in one state. Trellis. The published single state rate is the cheapest honest entry into judge and opposing counsel analytics that exists, and your cases are in exactly the courts it covers.
• You litigate across several states. Do the multiplication before the demo. Three Trellis states at the Research tier costs more per year than most firms expect, and at that point a national quote deserves a hearing.
• You already pay LexisNexis. Ask for Lex Machina in the renewal rather than as a new purchase, and ask for the term discount in writing.
• What you actually need is the case that answers your question. Neither of these is that product, which is the next section.

What neither Lex Machina nor Trellis does

Neither is a case law research tool and neither has a citator. They tell you how litigation behaves: how this judge rules on this motion, how long this district takes, how this opposing firm settles. They do not tell you what the law is, they will not find the on-point precedent for your brief, and they cannot tell you whether the case you are about to cite is still good law. Those are separate purchases, and firms are regularly surprised by that at renewal.

It is worth being clear about the boundary in the other direction too. Analytics answers questions about the public docket. If the question you actually have is about your own matter data, your own realization rates or your own settlement history, no litigation analytics vendor holds that record, and the tool you want is one that answers plain-English questions against your own database rather than against the courts'.

Where we fit, and where we do not

Cases does the research half, not the analytics half. You ask a legal question in plain English and get on-point precedents back with a plain-English summary, the holding, and a citation you can open and check, at 29 dollars per user per month with the price on the page and no term commitment. We have no judge analytics, no docket data, no outcome modeling and no citator, so we cannot tell you how a judge rules or whether a case has been overruled. If you need those, buy them from the vendors on this page.

What we would argue is that most firms buy analytics before they have solved research, and research is the daily job. The legal research pricing comparison puts every published rate in this market side by side, the Trellis platform page goes deeper on state trial court coverage, and the legal research platforms guide covers the research vendors these two sit alongside.

Whichever you buy, verify the citation before it goes in the brief. Analytics will not catch a case that does not exist, and neither will a docket.