COVID litigation focused on insurance, contracts and employment, research showed

Legal analytics company Lex Machina announced Wednesday it has updated its systems with new tools to track the impacts of COVID-19 on litigation and found that insurance, contracts and employment are the top practice areas with cases caused by the pandemic.

Lex Machina, a LexisNexis company, has been publishing research on COVID-19 litigation with its COVID-19 Impact Analyzer App and blog posts, since pandemic-related lawsuits began pouring in at the beginning of the year. It found that of the nearly 4,000 COVID-19 related cases filed in federal court since January, 698 involved insurance, 696 contract and 198 employment.

Lex Machina's legal experts reviewed cases with complaints mentioning COVID-19 keywords and then verified whether the case was filed as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, according to a statement released Wednesday.

"With practitioners facing unprecedented challenges, it is especially important to be able to quickly and easily research and understand activity in specific courts, what cases are working their way through the system, and how current activity compares to previous trends," Rachel Bailey, the data relations manager at Lex Machina, said in the statement.

From January through September, a large number of product liability cases were filed, causing an overall increase in case filings for 2020, Lex Machina found. However excluding product liability cases, it also found overall filings are down 11% from 2019.

While case filings in most practice areas are down in 2020 compared to 2019, case filings in the practice areas of contracts, insurance, patent, product liability and securities are up, according to Wednesday's statement.

One way the analytics team has been measuring court activity is by looking at the number of cases with a finding; there were fewer cases with findings at all stages of trial. Also, with most courts closing their doors for extended periods of time during the pandemic and many still not having trials, it is not surprising Lex Machina found trials are down 51%.

-- Blaise Scemama