This past week The National Law Journal published an article that examined how lower courts are ruling in the wake of Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, a significant 2018 decision on workplace arbitration contracts.

Ruling 5-4 in Epic, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that contracts requiring employees to arbitrate individually rather than collectively must be enforced, concluding the bar on collective action doesn't violate the National Labor Relations Act.

Here's what the NLJ's analysis found:

• About 63 percent of decisions citing Epic were resolved in favor of the defendant.
• When citing Epic in the context of class action litigation, judges compelled arbitration slightly more than half the time.
• In workplace litigation, judges citing Epic compelled arbitration nearly 70 percent of the time where arbitration was the main issue before the court.

To conduct its analysis, The National Law Journal identified lower court cases that cited Epic through December 2018 with help from San Francisco-based legal technology company Casetext. The team read the nearly 100 decisions and did additional research to assign categories to each case.

>> View the full article and charts here.

With this data project, we're trying something new and publishing the data we assembled on GitHub. What you'll find in our GitHub repository is an overview of the project and our methodology, the full data set, a data dictionary, and something called a Jupyter Notebook that walks through the code we used to slice the data (best viewed on your laptop or desktop computer). We invite you to review our work and download the spreadsheet of cases for your own research or exploration.