The litigation-analytics giants are built for civil cases. They describe their own scope.
Lex Machina, Bloomberg Law's Litigation Analytics, and Pre/Dicta are powerful tools for civil litigators. Lex Machina and Bloomberg Law document that their analytics exclude criminal cases; Pre/Dicta positions its prediction product around civil litigation. If you defend criminal cases, the platforms the big firms tout were never pointed at your docket. BenchRecon is.
What the analytics platforms exclude
This is not our characterization of their products. Each line below is the platform's own documented scope, quoted verbatim, linked to the source it was taken from.
- Lex MachinaLegal Analytics (LexisNexis)
Lex Machina's analytics are drawn from federal civil district-court dockets. A law-library guide summarizing its coverage states the scope plainly:
“Note that they do not have information about criminal, family, or small claims cases.”
Documents that criminal cases are excluded. UNH Franklin Pierce Law Library: Lex Machina coverage guide
- Bloomberg LawLitigation Analytics
Bloomberg Law's Litigation Analytics is built from district and appellate civil dockets. Across its analytics modules, the documented coverage note reads:
“Criminal dockets and prisoner petitions are not included.”
Documents that criminal cases are excluded. UNH Franklin Pierce Law Library: Bloomberg Litigation Analytics guide
- Pre/DictaPredictive Judicial Intelligence
Pre/Dicta sells outcome prediction, motion by motion. It positions that capability around civil practice in its own words:
“This affects virtually every aspect of civil litigation, from initial case assessment through final resolution”
States its focus is civil litigation. Pre/Dicta: Predictive Judicial Intelligence
We name only what we can quote. Platforms whose criminal coverage is mixed or partial are not listed here as exclusions. The line above is drawn exactly where each vendor draws it.
Criminal-defense-first. Built on public records, every figure cited.
BenchRecon is research tooling for the defense bar across state, county, and federal practice. It does not predict your judge and it does not sell you a black box. It pulls the public records a criminal case actually turns on, the testifying officer's file, the sentencing distribution for the charge, the forensic-reliability record, and hands each back with its source attached, so an exhibit survives the government's objection instead of reading like internet research. Below is only what ships today.
Paid, source-backed deliverables
- Officer Lookup$147
The officer testifying against your client, pulled as a source-cited public-record file: certification discipline and complaint history across Florida (FDLE/CJSTC) and six more jurisdictions, with the records-demand letter drafted.
Florida county-by-charge sentencing distributions from FDLE CJDT clerk-of-court data, every figure carrying its denominator.
Per-discipline Daubert challenge briefs grounded in PCAST 2016 and NAS 2009, the reliability fights that decide state DUI, drug, and violent-crime cases. Florida adopted Daubert in 2019.
Fourth-Amendment suppression motion templates (Terry stop, pretextual traffic stop, consent search, warrant defects, and more) with the controlling authority sequenced in.
Brady, Giglio, Rule 16, and Henthorn discovery-demand templates, the disclosure fight named before you draft the motion to compel.
Charge-conference instrument assembled from the verbatim standard jury instructions, with lesser-includeds, an amendment-recency diff, and the preservation rule for your forum.
§ 3553(a) sentencing-memorandum scaffold with the departure and variance authority organized for you to complete.
§ 3582 sentence-reduction research with your district's USSC grant rate by asserted ground and the case count behind each rate.
Free, source-linked reference tools
Computes total sentence points and the lowest permissible sentence straight from Fla. Stat. § 921.0024.
FDLE/CJSTC certification discipline across every Florida agency: revocations, suspensions, and crimen-falsi offenses, searchable.
3.9 million charges from FDLE CJDT clerk-of-court data: actual versus guideline sentences.
The charge chapters, the Rules of Criminal Procedure, and the Evidence Code, verbatim, each linked to its official source.
Checks brief citations against the CourtListener opinion corpus, no account required.
What BenchRecon does not claim
Pre/Dicta predicts civil motion outcomes; we do not offer a criminal equivalent, and we will not pretend the public record supports one. BenchRecon does not sell judge-outcome prediction for criminal cases. The Florida clerk-of-court sentencing data has no judge field, and where a record is thin, the deliverable labels it a gap rather than dressing a guess as a finding. The advantage is not a crystal ball. It is that the criminal-defense public record, the one the civil platforms leave on the floor, is assembled, cited, and handed to you in the form a hearing accepts.