A litigation database is a collection of data related to legal proceedings, used for record keeping or research. Software and SaaS tools are available to assist in building and managing these databases. Examples include Lloyd’s of London and General Crane USA. Thematic databases focus on specific areas such as intellectual property or medical malpractice. The NHS in the UK has a database of malpractice claims. The Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse is a comprehensive source of IP cases in the US.
A database is a collection of data, organized in a computer file in such a way that it can be easily searched and sorted. Litigation is the involvement in legal proceedings. Therefore, a litigation database is any database that contains a collection of data relating to legal proceedings. This could range from a personal collection of case data by an attorney on all or part of a law firm’s records to a national or international collection of data on litigation in general or on a particular litigation topic in particular. The purpose of the database could be, for example, record keeping or research.
The software is available to assist attorneys and law firms in building litigation databases. This is generally known as dispute support software. The documents are entered into a database that the user can search and sort, but also tag and filter. Newer to the market are SaaS (Software as a Service) dispute review tools which involve a dispute database that is hosted by a vendor on the internet alongside other services, rather than being managed by an in-house IT team with an of software and internal server space. Examples of companies that offer this service are ImageDepot® and Lexbe®.
Watchdogs sometimes publish company-focused litigation databases. An example of a litigation database that contains a portion of a case’s records is the Lloyd’s of London Litigation Database, which aims to contain all known litigation related to the Society of Lloyd’s and the investors it had recruited. This is a self-limiting database as the litigation you were talking about is over. However, material missing from the database continues to be added. Another example is the General Crane USA Bankruptcy Litigation Database, which documents the judicial history of General Crane USA® lawsuits.
More common are thematic litigation databases, such as those focusing on intellectual property, asbestos or medical malpractice. The National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) hosts the Antitrust Multistate Litigation Database. Thomson Derwent® maintains LitAlert®, a national database of patent and trademark infringement lawsuits that have been filed in US district courts and reported to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The NHS (National Health Service) in the UK has a database of malpractice claims, which one researcher in 2000 pointed out would be invaluable for both researchers and NHS organizations to be able to check records of claims relating to a particular doctor. The Stanford Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse, which is now co-managed with Lex Machina Inc., aims to be a comprehensive source of intellectual property cases in the United States.
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