Lex Machina legal analytics platform: login, litigation analytics and pricing
Lex Machina is the LexisNexis legal analytics product, and it is very much alive. Its website is not. Checked on 23 August 2026, lexmachina.com answers HTTP 308 on every path we tried, including robots.txt and a URL that never existed, and sends you to a LexisNexis page instead. The application is still running on a subdomain. Here is where the login actually lives, what the platform covers, what it costs, and how it compares. If you just need the case law rather than the analytics, start in the box on the right.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
In short
Lex Machina is a legal analytics platform that turns the litigation record into structured data, so a litigator can see how a specific judge rules on a specific motion type, how long a district takes, and what comparable cases were worth. It grew out of a Stanford patent research project, spun out in 2010, and was acquired by LexisNexis on 23 November 2015 for undisclosed terms. The brand survived; the website did not. Between 8 and 9 April 2025 lexmachina.com stopped serving its own pages, and it now returns HTTP 308 on every URL, funnelling everything into lexisnexis.com. The product itself still runs at law.lexmachina.com, whose root sends you to its own sign-in page, and that page returns HTTP 200 under the title "Log In | Lex Machina" before handing authentication to LexisNexis. There is no published price, no free tier and no published trial. Coverage is civil only: the complete federal district civil dataset since November 2024, 22 federal practice areas, and 100 or more enhanced state courts. All URLs verified 23 August 2026. Informational research, not legal advice, and always verify the citation.
Last updated August 2026
Checked, not remembered
What lexmachina.com does today
Almost everything written about Lex Machina was published while it still had a website, and describes a homepage that has not existed since April 2025. So we did the boring thing and made plain HTTP requests to every address a lawyer might still have in a bookmark. The results explain most of the confused searching around this product, including why people ask whether it is down.
| What you are asking about | Status today | How we know |
|---|---|---|
| lexmachina.com, any path | HTTP 308 Permanent Redirect into LexisNexis. | The homepage, /pricing, /product/, /legal-analytics/ and /legal-analytics-platform all answer HTTP 308 and send you to www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lex-machina.page. A 308 is the permanent, method-preserving redirect. It is the strongest statement a server can make that an address has moved for good. |
| A URL that never existed | Also HTTP 308 to the same page. | We requested lexmachina.com/nonexistent-xyz-123 and got the same 308 rather than a 404. That is how you tell a catch-all edge rule from a page-by-page cleanup. Every Lex Machina address ever printed on a slide, a conference badge or a law review footnote now lands on one LexisNexis product page. |
| robots.txt and sitemap.xml | Redirected too, not served. | lexmachina.com/robots.txt and /sitemap.xml both return 308 instead of a file. A domain that still wants to be crawled on its own terms keeps those two. Redirecting them is what handing a domain to the parent brand looks like. |
| lexmachina.com/blog | HTTP 308, but to a different destination. | This is the one exception we found. /blog goes to www.lexisnexis.com/community/insights/legal/lex-machina rather than the product page, which means somebody wrote at least one explicit mapping in front of the catch-all. The old Lex Machina research blog was worth preserving. The rest of the site was not. |
| www.lexmachina.com | Does not answer at all. | The www host still resolves in DNS, to the same address as the apex, but the TLS handshake fails because no valid certificate covers that name. So www.lexmachina.com is a hard connection error rather than a redirect. The migration covered the bare domain and left the www host behind. |
| law.lexmachina.com | Alive. HTTP 200, and this is the point. | The application is still running under its own brand at law.lexmachina.com. The root returns HTTP 302 to law.lexmachina.com/login?via=lexis&silent=true, and that login page returns HTTP 200 with the title "Log In | Lex Machina". Note the via=lexis parameter: sign-in is now handed to LexisNexis identity. The contrast is the tell: ask law.lexmachina.com for a path that never existed and it returns a plain HTTP 404, the way a normal application does, while the same request to lexmachina.com returns 308. One host is a running product, the other is a forwarding rule. |
| The LexisNexis page you land on | HTTP 403 to anything that is not a browser. | www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lex-machina.page returned HTTP 403 from CloudFront to our request. We are recording that as a limitation of this check rather than a claim about the page: it loads normally in a browser. We could not read it programmatically, so nothing on this page is sourced from it. |
| A published rate anywhere | None. | lexmachina.com/pricing does not exist as a page. It redirects like everything else, and the LexisNexis destination carries no rate card. Lex Machina is quoted per firm, like the rest of the LexisNexis line. |
All rows read directly from lexmachina.com, www.lexmachina.com, law.lexmachina.com and www.lexisnexis.com on 23 August 2026. Vendor infrastructure changes without notice, so re-check before relying on any of it.
Datable to a single night
When the Lex Machina website went dark
LexisNexis never announced this, so there is no press release to cite. There is something better: the Internet Archive records the HTTP status of every capture it takes, and the transition shows up cleanly in that record. The site was serving normally one afternoon and redirecting the next.
lexmachina.com captured returning HTTP 200. Its own site, its own pages.
The last archived capture that still returns HTTP 200.
The first archived capture returning HTTP 308. The redirect is in place.
A 301 or 308 redirect. Sixteen months without the site coming back.
Two things follow from that. First, if a colleague insists Lex Machina shut down, they are describing the website, not the product, and you can show them the login. Second, any Lex Machina link in an old memo, a CLE deck or a vendor comparison spreadsheet no longer goes where it says it goes. It goes to a LexisNexis product page, which is a reasonable landing spot but not the page anyone cited.
The pattern worth learning
Three ways a legal research vendor disappears
We have now checked the infrastructure behind most of the big US legal research names, and the status codes sort them into three groups. Which group a vendor falls into tells you more about what happened to your subscription than the press release does.
A rename
The name goes, the address moves, the login survives. Thomson Reuters kept the WestlawNext host answering and still runs the flagship on it. LexisNexis routes advance.lexis.com to a working sign-in years after retiring the Lexis Advance name. Fastcase redirects its login to a live gateway. You lose a brand and keep everything else.
A shutdown
The product ends and the domain is actively withdrawn. Casetext serves HTTP 410 Gone on every path, including robots.txt and a URL that never existed, and there is no working login anywhere. A 410 is a deliberate instruction to search engines to delete the pages. Your links are dead and your saved work is unreachable.
An absorption
The shopfront is demolished and the product carries on inside the parent. That is Lex Machina. Every marketing URL 308s into lexisnexis.com, but law.lexmachina.com answers 200 and hands sign-in to LexisNexis identity. Nothing was lost except the ability to read about the product without talking to a salesperson.
The practical value of telling these apart is that they call for different responses. An absorption needs a new bookmark. A rename needs nothing at all. A shutdown needs a migration plan and a sweep of every brief you filed with a link in it. We documented the rename pattern on our WestlawNext page and our Lexis Advance page, and the shutdown pattern in full on our Casetext page.
There is a procurement lesson buried in there too. When you sign a legal research or analytics contract, the question worth asking is not whether the vendor might be acquired, because in this market most of them are. It is what happens to your links, your saved searches and your login if it is. Casetext subscribers found out the hard way that the answer can be nothing survives.
Analytics, not research
What Lex Machina actually is
Legal research tools answer the question "what does the law say". Lex Machina answers a different one: "what usually happens". It takes the filings and orders that already exist in the federal and state docket systems, cleans and codes them, resolves parties and counsel into consistent entities, and extracts outcomes, damages, remedies and findings into fields you can count and filter.
That normalization step is the whole product. Raw docket text sitting in PACER cannot tell you how often a particular judge grants a motion to dismiss in employment cases, because "granted", "granted in part" and "denied as moot" are buried in prose across thousands of separate orders. Coded data can tell you in a second. Everything Lex Machina sells follows from having done that work at scale.
The origin story explains the shape of it. A Stanford professor could not find out where patent cases were best filed, so the clearinghouse was built to answer that one empirical question, and the commercial product generalised it. That is why the strongest coverage is federal, why it started in patent, and why it is organized by practice area rather than by jurisdiction.
Questions it is built to answer
How does this judge rule on this motion type, and how long does she take to rule?
How quickly does this district get a case of this kind to trial, and how often does one get there at all?
What have comparable cases been worth, by damages type and by venue?
How has opposing counsel actually litigated: do they try cases, or settle on the courthouse steps?
Has this party been sued for this before, and how did those matters end?
Where should we file, given everything above?
The question that decides fit
What Lex Machina covers, and what it does not
Analytics are worthless outside their coverage. A judge analytics product that does not hold your judge is a subscription you will not open twice. These are the figures the company and the trade press have published, attributed rather than asserted, because we cannot audit the dataset ourselves.
| Area | Stated coverage | What that means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Federal district civil cases | Complete, as of the Full Federal launch in November 2024 | Reported by the trade press as more than 3.7 million cases with outcome analytics. The only civil category excluded is prisoner petitions. |
| Federal practice areas | 22, per the company | Built out one practice area at a time, starting with patent and expanding into antitrust, securities, employment, bankruptcy, trademark, copyright, product liability and others. |
| State courts, enhanced | 100 or more, per the company | Enhanced means judge, court, law firm, attorney and party analytics rather than a bare docket. This is the growth area and it is uneven by geography. |
| State courts, basic data | 1,300 or more, per company materials | Wider but shallower. Check your specific county before assuming your venue is covered at the level you need. |
| Criminal matters | Not the product | Every announcement, dataset description and practice area list describes civil litigation. If you practice criminal defense, this is not a tool built for your docket. |
| Case law text and citator | Not what it does | Lex Machina is analytics over the litigation record, not a case law research service and not a citator. Reading the opinions and checking whether they are still good law happens elsewhere in the LexisNexis stack. |
The single most important line in that table for most firms is the state court one. American civil litigation happens overwhelmingly in state courts, and enhanced coverage of 100 or more of them is real progress from a standing start but is still a small fraction of the roughly 3,000 counties in the United States. Before you buy, name the five venues you actually appear in and make the representative show you each one.
Stanford 2006, LexisNexis 2015
How a research project became a LexisNexis product
A Stanford professor cannot answer a basic question
Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law School professor, wanted to know where the best place to file a patent case was, and found that no source held the empirical record needed to answer it. That gap became the Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse, a searchable database of US patent cases built jointly by the law school and the computer science department.
Lex Machina spins out of the clearinghouse
Stanford Law School announced on 5 January 2010 that the project would continue as a private company. Lemley, George Gregory and Joshua Walker are credited as founders. The commercial premise was that the docket record itself, once cleaned and coded, answers questions no treatise can: how this judge rules on this motion, how long this district takes, how this opposing firm actually settles.
LexisNexis acquires the company
Announced 23 November 2015. Terms were not disclosed then and have not been since. Lex Machina kept its brand, its Menlo Park office and its product name, which is unusual: most acquired legal research tools lose the name within a few years. Ten years on, the software still says Lex Machina at the top.
State court analytics arrive
Coverage expanded beyond federal litigation into state courts, which is where the large majority of American civil cases actually sit. By 2024 the company announced it had reached 100 enhanced state courts, with lighter data across a much wider set.
Full Federal completes the federal picture
Lex Machina announced outcome analytics across its complete civil federal district court dataset, reported by the trade press as more than 3.7 million cases. The only civil cases left out are prisoner petitions, which the company judged commercially irrelevant to law firms and corporate legal departments.
The marketing site is switched off
Between 8 and 9 April 2025, on the archive record, lexmachina.com stopped serving its own pages and began redirecting into lexisnexis.com. The product did not close. The shopfront did.
Worth noting how rare the 2015 outcome is. Casetext was bought and closed inside two years. Fastcase was merged twice and its own pricing page now redirects to a deleted URL. Ravel Law was acquired by LexisNexis and folded away entirely. Lex Machina kept its name, its office and its product for a decade under the same owner, which is the strongest thing anyone can say about how that acquisition was handled.
Published and reported never share a column
What Lex Machina costs
This is the most searched question about the product and it has an unsatisfying answer, so let us be precise about why. We split every claim into what a vendor states on its own site and what buyers report. The two never get merged into one figure, because merging them is how a rumor turns into a fact that gets repeated for a decade.
| Question | Published by the vendor | Reported by buyers |
|---|---|---|
| What does Lex Machina cost? | No rate is published anywhere. lexmachina.com/pricing is not a page, it is a redirect, and the LexisNexis product page it lands on carries no figure. Lex Machina is quoted per firm. | We have no figure we are willing to attribute. Software directories list it as custom or quote-only, which is a restatement of the same fact rather than a number. Anyone quoting you a specific Lex Machina seat price without naming a source is guessing. |
| Is it sold separately or with LexisNexis? | It is sold within the LexisNexis line, and sign-in now runs through LexisNexis identity: the login URL carries a via=lexis parameter. In practice it is quoted as part of, or alongside, a LexisNexis agreement. | Buyers consistently describe it as an add-on negotiated on top of an existing LexisNexis contract rather than a standalone purchase. Budget for it as a line item on a larger agreement. |
| Is there a published comparator for budgeting? | Yes, one. Trellis publishes a rate card for state trial court analytics: 199.95 dollars per month, or 1,999.95 per year, for Research plus Judge Analytics, single state, metered at 900 annual content views. It is the only litigation analytics product in this market with a number on the page. | Nothing to report. Use the Trellis card as a floor for what analytics costs on its own, then expect a multi-state, federal, AmLaw-grade dataset to be quoted well above it. |
| Is there a free trial? | None published. There is no self-serve signup and no trial length stated on any page we can reach. Access starts with a sales conversation. | Demonstrations are routinely given to prospective firms. That is a demo, not a trial, and it is run by a representative rather than by you. |
If a directory page offers you a specific Lex Machina seat price, treat it as filler. We checked the obvious places and none of them name a source. The honest summary is that this is a quote-only product inside a quote-only vendor line, and the only leverage you have is knowing what the alternatives publish before you take the call. Our legal research pricing comparison collects every rate in this market that is actually printed on a vendor's own page.
Including where we lose
Lex Machina against the other litigation analytics options
We sell case law search, not analytics, so we are not a substitute for anything in the first four rows and the table says so plainly. It is here because the shortlist for "we need litigation analytics" and the shortlist for "we need to find the controlling authority" get confused constantly, usually by whoever is approving the budget.
| Tool | Best for | Price | Where it wins | Where it loses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lex Machina | Litigators and legal ops teams at firms that already buy LexisNexis and need federal outcome data. | Quote only. No published rate, no trial. | The deepest federal civil dataset of the group, complete across federal district courts since November 2024, coded by practice area with real outcome and damages data rather than raw docket text. | Nothing is published: not price, not trial length, not a signup. Civil only. It is not case law research and not a citator, so it is a second subscription rather than a replacement for one. |
| Trellis | Firms whose work is in state trial courts, especially single-state practices. | Published. 199.95 per month for Research plus Judge Analytics, single state. | The only one here with a rate card on the web. Strong on state trial courts and individual judge behavior, which is exactly where Lex Machina is thinnest. | Every tier is single state and metered by annual content views, so a multi-state practice multiplies the cost. Federal coverage is limited next to Lex Machina. |
| Westlaw litigation analytics | Firms already committed to Westlaw that want analytics inside the same window. | Quote only, bundled into a Westlaw agreement. | It sits next to KeyCite and the Key Number System, so you go from a trend to the authority without leaving the platform. Thomson Reuters does publish a Westlaw Advantage rate, which gives you a floor for the wider subscription. | You are buying into the Westlaw ecosystem to get it. Analytics depth in federal civil litigation is generally regarded as behind Lex Machina. |
| Bloomberg Law | Transactional and regulatory teams who want litigation analytics alongside dockets and news. | Quote only. Publishes a 14 day trial, the longest in this market. | Broad platform, strong docket tooling, and the only vendor here that lets you evaluate it for two weeks without a card before you talk about money. | Its citator, BCite, fared worst in the one independent accuracy study anyone has run. Analytics are one part of a large bundle rather than the focus. |
| Cases | Solos and small firms who need to find the controlling authority fast and have no analytics budget. | Published. 29 dollars per user per month, on the page, no quote. | Ask a legal question in plain English and get on-point US federal and state precedents with the holding and a citation you can open. The price is a number rather than a conversation. | We do not do litigation analytics at all. No judge ruling rates, no damages data, no timing curves, and no citator. If you need to know how a specific judge decides summary judgment motions, we are not the tool and we will not pretend to be. |
The useful split is this. If the question in front of you is strategic, meaning where to file, whether to move, what to settle for, you want analytics and the choice is mostly between federal depth from Lex Machina and state trial court depth from Trellis. If the question is doctrinal, meaning what the rule is and which case states it, analytics will not help you and a research tool will.
Real searches, answered directly
Lex Machina questions people actually ask
Is Lex Machina part of LexisNexis?
Yes. LexisNexis acquired Lex Machina on 23 November 2015 and terms were never disclosed. Unusually, the brand survived the acquisition: the software still carries the Lex Machina name ten years later. What did not survive is the separate website. Since April 2025 lexmachina.com redirects every URL into lexisnexis.com, and the application login now authenticates through LexisNexis identity.
Is Lex Machina down?
No, the product is running. If you typed lexmachina.com and ended up on a LexisNexis page, that is a permanent redirect rather than an outage. The application lives at law.lexmachina.com, whose sign-in page returned HTTP 200 under the title "Log In | Lex Machina" when we checked it on 23 August 2026. Go straight there to sign in. The www version of the domain genuinely does fail, because no valid certificate covers that host.
How do I log in to Lex Machina?
Go to law.lexmachina.com. The root redirects to law.lexmachina.com/login and that page loads normally, titled "Log In | Lex Machina". The redirect carries a via=lexis parameter, meaning sign-in is handed to LexisNexis identity, so your LexisNexis credentials are usually what you need. Bookmarks pointing at lexmachina.com will not get you there: that domain no longer serves a login page of its own.
What happened to lexmachina.com?
It was switched off as a standalone site and folded into LexisNexis. On the Internet Archive record, the last capture returning HTTP 200 is dated 8 April 2025 and the first capture returning a 308 redirect is dated 9 April 2025. Every capture since has been a redirect. The company was not shut down and the software was not retired. Only the marketing site went.
What is Lex Machina used for?
Predicting how litigation is likely to go, using the record of how it has actually gone. Litigators use it to see how a specific judge rules on specific motion types, how long a district takes to reach trial, what damages have been awarded in comparable cases, and how an opposing firm or party has behaved in past matters. It answers strategy questions, not research questions.
How much does Lex Machina cost?
There is no published price. lexmachina.com/pricing is a redirect rather than a page, and the LexisNexis product page it points to carries no rate. Lex Machina is quoted per firm, generally as part of or alongside a LexisNexis agreement. For a sense of scale, the only litigation analytics product that publishes a rate is Trellis, at 199.95 dollars per month for a single state.
Is Lex Machina free?
No, and there is no free tier or self-serve signup. Access begins with a sales conversation, and no trial length is published anywhere. This is the opposite end of the market from the free public sources: CourtListener and govinfo carry federal opinions at no cost, and PACER waives fees at or below 30 dollars a quarter, but none of them give you analytics over the docket.
Does Lex Machina have criminal cases?
No. Everything the company describes, from the original patent clearinghouse through the Full Federal launch, is civil litigation. Its complete federal district dataset is explicitly the civil one, with prisoner petitions excluded as commercially irrelevant. If your practice is criminal defense, litigation analytics of this shape does not exist for your docket in this product.
How far back does Lex Machina go?
Far enough that recency, not depth, is the practical constraint. The dataset began as the Stanford patent clearinghouse assembled from 2006 and has been extended backwards and outwards ever since, reaching more than 3.7 million federal district civil cases with the November 2024 Full Federal release. The more useful question when you evaluate it is how current the state court venues you actually practice in are kept, because state coverage is the uneven part.
How does Lex Machina work?
It takes court documents, cleans and codes them, and turns them into structured fields you can filter and count. Docket entries are classified, parties and counsel are resolved to consistent entities, and outcomes, damages, remedies and findings are extracted. The value is in that normalization: raw PACER text cannot tell you how often a judge grants a motion to dismiss, and a coded dataset can.
Lex Machina vs CourtLink: what is the difference?
CourtLink is docket retrieval and alerting, and Lex Machina is analysis on top of dockets. CourtLink helps you pull filings and get notified when something moves in a case you are tracking. Lex Machina aggregates the whole record to tell you what usually happens. Both are LexisNexis products and firms often hold both, because a tracking tool and a prediction tool answer different questions.
Does Lex Machina have an API?
Yes, an API has long been part of the offering, used by legal operations and data teams who want the analytics inside their own dashboards rather than in the web interface. It is not self-serve and it is not separately priced on any public page. Like the product itself, access and terms come through a LexisNexis representative.
Do I still need to verify citations when I use analytics tools?
Yes, on every platform including ours. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database, which counts only decisions where a court explicitly found or clearly implied reliance on hallucinated material, listed 1,954 cases at its 23 August 2026 update, against 719 in January 2026. Courts have not sanctioned lawyers for using software. They have sanctioned filings nobody read. Open the case and read the passage you are relying on.
Keep researching
Analytics tell you what usually happens. We tell you what the law says.
Ask your question in plain English and get on-point US federal and state precedents with the holding and a real citation. Published at 29 dollars per month, no quote, no multi-year term. Informational research, not legal advice, always verify the citation.