NEW YORK ­— Legal research provider LexisNexis Group has acquired Lex Machina, a first mover in the area of litigation analytics, the companies announced Monday. The move will expand offerings to Lexis users and could rapidly deploy Lex Machina's technology to areas beyond its roots in intellectual property.

While the financials of the deal were not disclosed, Lex Machina CEO Josh Becker said the Silicon Valley-based company will continue to exist as a subsidiary of LexisNexis, allowing it to maintain its culture and continue to develop the product with the support of the larger organization. Becker said that through the deal Lex Machina will gain access to Lexis' massive data library. Lex Machina pushed beyond patent law to trademark and copyright earlier this year, and now it will start expanding its analytics to federal civil law and eventually state law,

“This is recognition of the importance of analytics in law … and a validation that analytics are here to stay,” Becker said. “The first piece for us is to just get access to documents, and since our analytics are already tuned for legal documents we're confident that our algorithmic magic can produce some great use cases. After that there's lots of other really cool and exciting things we can do, including offering analytics via Lexis' products, but for now we're focused on expanding practice areas.”