Bob Ambrogi Reports on the UniCourt Enterprise API in LawSites
on Topics: Awards | Legal Data API | News
The UniCourt Enterprise API is LegalTech’s only API-first suite purpose-built to automate the discovery and delivery of structured state and federal court data and analytics for business development, litigation strategy and outcomes, docket management, and much more. It enables law firms to weave together external litigation data enriched by UniCourt’s best-in-class data normalization with internal data on clients and matters, making it significantly easier for firms to proactively engage new clients and grow existing engagements.
We’re thrilled to have Bob Ambrogi report on the recent launch of the UniCourt Enterprise API and interview UniCourt CEO and Co-Founder, Josh Blandi, in his article, With New Enterprise API, UniCourt Takes an API-First Approach To Providing ‘Legal Data as a Service.’
For over two decades, Bob Ambrogi has been a stalwart reporter in the legal technology and legal innovation space. Bob is an attorney, an award-winning blogger and podcaster, and has been the editor-in-chief of multiple legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and the editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.
With Bob’s experience across the legal industry as a veteran legal journalist, it was great to have him sit down with Josh Blandi and talk about the launch of the UniCourt Enterprise API.
An API-First Approach to Providing Legal Data as a Service
In the beginning of his blog post in LawSites, Bob provides some helpful historical context to set the stage for why UniCourt’s API-first approach is such a gamechanger for the legal industry.
As Bob noted, when UniCourt was founded in 2014, our initial focus was on developing an application to provide our clients with easy access to federal and state court records. Soon after UniCourt’s founding, our clients began asking for API access to the underlying data in our online app, which ultimately led the the release of our first-generation of Legal Data APIs in 2017.
After years worth of feedback, and seeing our clients usage of UniCourt’s APIs continue to increase, Josh and team recognized that our app-based approach of mirroring our API’s functionality to our app, wasn’t meeting our clients’ needs for a more streamlined solution for on-demand legal data. So, “in 2020, UniCourt went back to the drawing board, devoting more than 100 engineers and nearly three years of effort to rebuilding the APIs from the ground up.”
“We’re now an API company,” Josh said in his conversation with Bob. “We adopted an API-first methodology, which means our focus was to create APIs first and allow a platform that’s flexible enough to accommodate an array of different use cases and then allow people to build applications and products and services off of that, rather than trying to mimic the constraints of our application.”
Bob also reiterated that the UniCourt Enterprise API is “designed to provide a plug-and-play architecture that makes it easy for law firms and other customers to handle an array of uses cases,” and includes extensive API documentation along with sample code, a Python library, quick-start guides, a knowledge base, and tutorials for top law firm use cases.
As Bob shared in his reporting, UniCourt’s new offering has two primary APIs, our Court Data API, “which includes data from federal and state courts, allowing users to conduct natural language searches and terms-and-connectors searches across court data and related entities,” and our Legal Analytics API, “which includes endpoints that are used to access the results of UniCourt’s analytics, enabling users to generate actionable insights from UniCourt’s legal data… on attorneys, law firms, judges, parties and cases.”
A Foundation for Future Expansion
Along with the immediate impact it will have on law firm business development, litigation strategy, and docket management, the UniCourt Enterprise API is a scalable solution, with a solid foundation intentionally designed for rapid expansion into new data sets and the development of new API endpoints.
As Josh shared with Bob, “what we’re doing is really foundational — our mission is really about making court data more organized, accessible and useful for everyone.” Josh further shared that “in building these APIs, we envision an open ecosystem that allows everybody to come in and plug into these data sets, pull them out, and be able to use them in innovative ways, whether it’s internally, or whether they want to build products and services.”
Compared to other providers of Legal Data as a Service, UniCourt’s “license on the data is about innovation and about wanting to have an ecosystem that’s driven off of this type of data for those who can use it.” From Josh’s perspective, “these new APIs will help drive a surge within law firms of how they use this data and what they build with it.”
While law firms dependent on legacy products for data and analytics are limited by what they can do with the underlying data, firms that invest in the data infrastructure needed to ingest third-party data via API have unmatched potential for developing insights and analytics from weaving together external and internal data sources.
You can read the full article here on LawSites.
Learn More About the UniCourt Enterprise API
The UniCourt Enterprise API represents a significant advancement in Legal Data as a Service compared to other APIs available in the legal marketplace and it is the only API-first platform providing comprehensive, real-time state and federal court data with best-in-class data normalization.
Speak with one of our API experts to learn more about the UniCourt Enterprise API.