UniCourt Wins Enterprise Award of the 2023 American Legal Technology Awards
on Topics: Awards | Company | Legal Tech
We are thrilled to share that UniCourt has been selected as the winner of the Enterprise Award of the 2023 American Legal Technology Awards.
Winning the Enterprise Award is an incredible testament to UniCourt’s journey from a legal tech startup in 2014 to a recognized industry leader in Legal Data as a Service (LDaaS) as an enterprise-level legal technology company providing real-time court data and legal analytics powered by the only API-first platform in LegalTech.
In this blog post, we’ll share some background on the American Legal Technology Awards, why UniCourt won the Enterprise Award, and give a shout out to all of the other winners, runner ups, and honorable mentions.
About the American Legal Technology Awards
The inaugural American Legal Technology Awards kicked off in 2020 with the vision to become the “Emmys of legal tech” in the United States and act as a rival awards to the British Legal Technology Awards, a well-attended, black tie event recognizing “leadership, innovation and technology as well as the individuals, teams and suppliers transforming the future of legal services.”
Unlike many of the other pay-to-play legal tech and legal industry awards, the American Legal Technology Awards does not require an entry fee for nominations and is not an annual participation trophy for incumbent vendors and law firms for the purpose of showcasing their innovation initiatives.
The Awards were co-founded in 2020 by Cat Moon, Director of the PoLI Institute and Director of Innovation Design for the Program on Law and Innovation at Vanderbilt Law School, Patrick Palace, Founder of Palace Law, and Tom Martin, Founder of LawDroid. The co-founders developed the Awards with the core mission to “hold up examples of excellence in creative innovation and technology in the legal industry for the purposes of (1) expanding our understanding of what is possible, (2) encouraging a virtuous cycle of improvement, and (3) creating a more just society.”
In addition to these three wonderful legal luminaries, the judges for the American Legal Technology Awards include an impressive list of legal technology pioneers, lawyers, legal professionals, and judges: Nicole Black, Nicole Bradick, Amanda Brown, Ann Cosimano, Gabriela Cubeiro, Sonja Ebron, Joseph Gartner, Jazz Hampton, Natalie Anne Knowlton, Dan Lear, Erin Levine, Colin Levy, Nefra-Ann MacDonald, Maya Markovich, Irene Mo, Dorna Moini, Nicole Morris, Mark Palmer, Nick Rishwain, Allen Rodriguez, Hon. Scott Schlegel, Julie Sobowale, Kristen Sonday, Quinten Steenhuis, Alex Su, Gabrial Teninbaum, Ed Walters, and Miguel Willis
The Headline Sponsor for this year’s American Legal Technology Awards was Clio, along with Partner Sponsors, ARAG Legal Insurance and GNGF, and MyCase as an Associate Sponsor. This year’s Awards also featured Artificial Lawyer, LawSites, and Lawyerist as media sponsors, and had Above the Law’s Joe Patrice also reporting on the winners.
Why UniCourt Won the Enterprise Award
Winning the Enterprise Award in 2023 represents a great milestone for UniCourt as a company.
When the American Legal Technology Awards initially launched in 2020, UniCourt was selected as the Runner Up for the Enterprise Award, coming in second place to legal tech behemoth Litera, which has reported rapid revenue growth from “$16 million in 2016 to $200 million in 2021” with no signs of slowing down.
The following year in 2021, UniCourt was selected as the winner for the Technology Award. This was largely due to our pioneering focus on providing Legal Data as a Service via APIs and the way we actively led the charge on improving how the legal industry interacts with litigation data by leveraging automation and structured data for knowledge management, competitive intelligence, business development, legal analytics, and machine learning models.
Winning the Enterprise Award brings everything full circle, as our vision to provide Legal Data as a Service with industry leading technology through our APIs, combined with the launch of the UniCourt Enterprise API in March of this year has propelled us ahead of the competition and carried forward our mission to make legal data more organized, accessible, and useful for Am Law firms and Fortune 500 companies.
To help give you a sense of the award selection process and why the judges selected UniCourt as the winner of the Enterprise Award, here are excerpts of our responses for the award submission process:
How does the nominee’s work expand our understanding of what is possible?
UniCourt has constantly pushed the envelope of what is possible in the legal data space. UniCourt is the original Legal Data as a Service (LDaaS) company. We have been offering APIs since 2017, and the recent launch of the UniCourt Enterprise API in 2023 represents the next generation of our open ecosystem to access legal data and analytics. The UniCourt Enterprise API is the gold standard in legal data, enabling rapid API integration, delivering real-time updates, and facilitating optimal litigation outcomes.
How does the nominee’s work encourage a virtuous cycle of improvement?
UniCourt has an incredibly open data licensing model, as we’re actively developing an open legal data ecosystem that allows everyone in the legal industry to come in and plug into our data sets, pull them out, and use them in innovative ways, whether internally or to build products and services to improve access to legal services and streamline service delivery.
How does the nominee’s work help to create a more just society?
UniCourt’s core mission as a company is to make court data and other public data more accessible and useful. This cornerstone drives what we do as a company and animates our continued push to ensure that the public has access to the court records and other public records impacting their daily lives.
UniCourt has also provided free access to our platform to legal aid organizations and is currently working with public policy researchers to develop in-depth studies on the impact of litigation, such as debt collection litigation, on consumers in state courts: https://debtcollectionlab.org/research/one-sided-litigation
Congratulations to the 2023 Award Winners
While we are excited about UniCourt winning the Enterprise Award, we also want to give a big shout out to all of the other winners, runner ups, and honorable mentions of the American Legal Technology Awards.
In years past, the Awards included eight diverse categories, representing a broad cross section of the legal industry. This year, the Access to Justice category was broken out into three subcategories, Individual, LegalTech, and Legal Aid, and two new categories were added, Education and Lifetime Achievement, bringing the total number of awards given out this year to 12.
Congratulations to this year’s winners!
Access to Justice
Individual
- Winner: Quinten Steenhuis
- Runner Up: Alex Guirgus
- Honorable Mention: Noella Sudbury
LegalTech
- Winner: SixFifty
- Runner Up: ¡Reclamo!
LegalAid
- Winner: Everyone Legal Clinic
- Runner Up: North Carolina Pro Bono Resource Center
Court
- Winner: Judicial Innovation Fellowship
- Runner Up: Legal Services Corporation’s Civil Court Data Initiative
- Honorable Mention: Immediation
Education
- Winner: Carla Reyes
- Runner Up: Jonathan Askin
- Honorable Mention: David Colarusso
Enterprise
- Winner: UniCourt
- Runner Up: Free Law Project
- Honorable Mention: Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions
Individual
- Winner: Sandra Sandoval
- Runner Up: Kelly Twigger
- Honorable Mention: Matt Kerbis
Law Department
- Winner: Farrah Pepper
- Runner Up: Disco Pro Bono Program
- Honorable Mention: ARM
Law Firm
- Winner: Clifford Chance
- Runner Up: Arent Fox
- Honorable Mention: Abogado TIC
Startup
- Winner: RASA
- Runner Up: ZAF
- Honorable Mention: Estateably
Technology
- Winner: Gavel
- Runner Up: GlobalNDA
- Honorable Mention: Disco’s Cecilia
Lifetime Achievement
- Winner: Carolyn Elefant
Learn More About the UniCourt Enterprise API
We’re honored to have been selected as the winner of this year’s Enterprise Award, and want to give a big thanks to the entire team at UniCourt, including our legal professionals, sales and marketing professionals, data scientists, physicists, and computer engineers, who all made this possible.
If you’re interested in learning how the UniCourt Enterprise API is empowering business development, litigation strategy, experience management, docket management, and other data-centric functions, speak with with one of our API experts to learn more.