Last week, we announced that we will be making a series of changes and unveiled our new website. This week, we’re announcing a flurry of improvements to the Title IX Lawsuits Database itself. The following changes are designed to help improve the user experience and give our work more polish. All changes have been implemented as of the last few days.

A New Search Engine Dedicated to Oral Arguments

As our library of recordings has grown voluminous, it made sense to create additional methods of searching and sorting them. We’ve created a new search engine tailored to oral arguments and placed it near the top of the Oral Arguments page. This will allow you to search oral arguments by court, judge, school, circuit, and other info.

Enhanced Mobile Functionality and a Cleaner, Sharper Look

Ease of use on smartphones can be a stickler for database design given that large tables often don’t display well on small devices, but we’ve been able to make some improvements. We’ve changed the structure of database tables so they look much cleaner and organized on mobile devices. For example, spreadsheets now make better use of vertical space so that more information about a given record can be viewed before needing to side-scroll and data such as lawsuit names are no longer truncated due to lack of space. Example:

On Detail pages, data labels and cells now appear much less blockish, and the menus and search engines have been cleaned up with sharper text and better spacing. Example:

This cleaner look extends to the desktop view of the database as well.

Refresh of Attorney and Judge Data

We periodically scan all attorneys and judges in our database to ensure we have their latest information as they change firms, courts, and sometimes careers. We’ve completed our latest scan, ensuring all 1,282 attorneys who have litigated Title IX lawsuits and 591 judges who have heard such lawsuits have recent data.

Database Guide Restructured

An overdue item, the guide has historically existed as a long vertical section that has only grown longer as new features were added. We have reorganized the guide into a tab system to allow for organization and ease of navigation. A screenshot is below:

The guide is now exclusively located on the database page on the main website and is no longer available on the “offsite” version of the database which will be deprecated soon.

New Data Points

We’ve added several new data points. These are visible in tables, search engines, and various lawsuit, court, and school “Detail” pages. They are:

Duration of Suit (Days)

This data point will total the days a lawsuit has been litigated so far and is available on all lawsuits in which the initial filing date is known, which is most of them. It was added to help users get a quicker, clearer idea of how long lawsuits take to litigate. It is now listed on each lawsuit’s “Detail” page (example). More importantly, it has been added as a search engine term to the main lawsuits search engine, bringing us up to 35 total search terms.

This also allows for new search combos. Let’s say you wish to search for all inactive lawsuits with a duration of less than 31 days that ended in a settlement or a favorable judicial decision, or let’s say you wish to compare the duration of lawsuits by circuit to get an idea of which circuits generally resolve lawsuits faster than others. These kinds of search combos are now possible.

Minutes (Oral Arguments)

Oral argument recordings range from 20 to 79 minutes. The length of each recording wasn’t visible upfront, so we added this as a data point to our Oral Arguments page. We also added it to our new oral arguments search engine so users can search and sort by shorter or longer recordings.

# of Judges Hearing Title IX Suits

Found on the Courts & Judges page, this data point sums the number of judges who have heard a Title IX lawsuit at a particular court. It is useful in seeing which courts have a broader or narrower spread of judges relative to the number of total lawsuits litigated at that venue. LA Superior Court leads here with 21 judges who have heard Title IX lawsuits.

Other Minor Database Changes

• In the main Lawsuits spreadsheet, lawsuits are now sorted by their filing date instead of by state, with the most recently filed lawsuits at the top. This will help users keep track of new lawsuits more easily.
• The data point “Last Reviewed/Updated” on lawsuit records has been split into two data points (“Last Reviewed” and “Last Updated”) to help us keep track of when we last reviewed a lawsuit for critical updates but did not see anything new from the court. This will also let users more quickly find lawsuits that were updated, as opposed to merely reviewed by our staff.
• We’ve further segmented the data on each lawsuits’ detail page so that data is more appropriately categorized by school, attorney, judge, court, and admin/meta info (screenshot).
• When viewing a lawsuit’s detail page, a new data point “Last Updated By” shows which Title IX For All administrator most recently updated the lawsuit. This data point is more for internal use, however.

As you can see, we’ve been busy. We’re not done yet, though. Thank you for supporting our work. More to come soon!