API Solutions for Corporate Legal Operations – Jeff Cox Featured on ILTA YouTube
on Topics: News
In the digital world we all live in, APIs are constantly moving around the data we need to make our personal and professional lives easier and our online experiences even more seamless. Fueling real-time legal data solutions, APIs enable innovation across the legal industry for law firms, legal departments, and legal operations.
UniCourt is excited to share that our former Director of Content, Jeff Cox, was featured on the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) YouTube channel in API Solutions for Corporate Legal Operations. As a member of the Corporate Content Coordinating Team of ILTA, Jeff works with other legal professionals at ILTA to develop educational content for legal departments, including his previous article published on the ILTA Blog, Early Case Assessments for Corporate Legal Departments: Start Small and Build Your Barometer.
In this blog post, we’ll detail the top 10 considerations Jeff highlighted for selecting the best API provider for third-party integrations, explore some easy starting points for legal operations to begin using APIs, and a more sophisticated use case involving weaving together external and internal data sources for deeper insights.
Top 10 Considerations for Selecting the Best API Solution
Sifting between the growing number of API solutions for an increasing number of external data sources can make selecting the best API for third-party data integrations exceedingly challenging for legal operations teams.
To help your legal ops team differentiate between API providers and ensure the solution you choose matches your data needs, here are 10 considerations to keep in mind during your selection process.
1. API-First Approach
Does the provider offer “API-first” APIs with unfettered access to the data you need or “app-based” APIs tied to an existing application?
2. Data Coverage
Does the API provider offer comprehensive data coverage with an active data roadmap for the courts, legislatures, agencies, and other data sources you need?
3. Use Case Alignment
Does the provider’s solution align with your needs for gathering specific insights, and are their APIs designed to streamline your internal data-intensive processes?
4. API Documentation
Does the provider make their API documentation public, and is it easy to comprehend for non-developers with step-by-step walkthroughs and sample code bases?
5. Data Normalization
Does the API provider use best-in-class normalization by leveraging trusted, public data sets to normalize the entities in its data sets?
6. Data Interoperability
Does the API provider use common classifications, a uniform data structure, and industry standards, such as the Standards Advancement for the Legal Industry (SALI), to ensure data interoperability?
7. API Integrations
Does the provider have existing API integrations that align with your tech stack, are they willing to work with your team to build integrations, and what is the lead time and the resource requirements for using their APIs?
8. API Maturity
Does the API provider have next-generation APIs with an active development roadmap, or are their APIs first generation, still in beta, or in early-stage alpha?
9. Support Services
Does the API provider offer on-demand support services capable of assisting you with developing API queries, automating data pulls, exploring data sets, and account management issues?
10. Data Readiness
Do you have internal engineering capabilities and resources budgeted to integrate an API solution, and if not, are you willing to engage managed service providers to develop integrations?
Starting Points for Leveraging API Solutions
Now that we’ve covered some key considerations for selecting the best API solution for your legal operations team’s data needs, let’s review some easy starting points for taking advantage of APIs.
Tracking Litigation
For corporate legal departments with anything more than a drip of litigation, a great place to start with APIs is tracking your litigation to begin automating the collection and capture of data and documents connected to your cases.
In terms of low-hanging fruit, tracking litigation using external API solutions is one of the least sophisticated use cases for APIs as it typically requires the least development time and process redesign.
It also offers legal operations teams some immediate benefits:
- Drastically reduce the amount of manual data collection and entry connected to managing litigation,
- Remove the potential for human error associated with manual data entry at scale,
- Save resources from reductions in workforce due to no longer needing an army of paralegals or analysts constantly copying and pasting data, and
- Increase turnaround time on decision-making with data directly fed into your matter management systems.
Enriching Experience Databases
Another great starting point for corporate legal operations teams looking to leverage API solutions is enriching internal databases on your outside counsel’s experience.
Most legal ops teams have a good understanding of the experience their outside counsel has handling their own legal needs, but what about the experience those same firms have representing other clients in different practice areas?
Consider what would happen if a new legal issue started to impact your business or a novel type of litigation was filed against your company and you didn’t know if any of your current panel firms have the experience needed. Rather than sending out an RFP to a vast number of your outside counsel, you can leverage external data sources to enrich your internal databases.
APIs are a perfect option for enriching your outside counsel databases to create a better picture of the previous experience your firms have in other areas of law, and for developing more robust master data sets on your panel firms.
Connecting Systems Together
Though it may not necessarily require the use of an API provider, one of the best starting points for legal operations teams to consider is developing your own internal data pipelines to connect your most critical systems.
Connecting your systems together can significantly minimize the manual efforts to gather the data you need for better reporting and give you real-time insights into the critical processes and workflows essential to your legal department. And, if you don’t have the engineering resources internally to build your API integrations, consider working with a managed service provider to help get your project off the ground.
However, an important word of caution is to ensure you get your data house in order before implementing internal APIs and building data pipelines. There is nothing worse that flooding your systems with bad or unstructured data, so make sure your systems are ready to speak to each other before bringing them into the same room
Building Proprietary LLMs
Contrasted with leveraging third-party API integrations for litigation tracking and experience database enrichment, a more sophisticated use case for legal operations teams to explore is merging together their internal data with external data sources to gain insights that neither data set could produce on its own.
One of the real advantages that legal ops teams with large volumes of litigation have is their historical case settlement data, which is often sealed and inaccessible to opposing parties and opposing counsel.
Settlement data provides corporate legal teams with an incredibly rich source of often untapped insights and answers to key questions connected to the actual financial value or exposure that certain types of litigation present for their business.
To go beyond just extracting insights from internal settlement data, legal operations teams seeking a competitive advantage can combine settlement data with external court data gathered from an API.
After ingesting and combining these data sets, legal ops can then begin to use Generative AI to surface new intelligence from these combined sources, such as answering deeper questions about the factors impacting your settlements and jury awards in similar cases, and uncovering new opportunities for reducing your risk and protecting your company in future litigation.
Building your own internal, proprietary LLM–or large language model–to extract insights from your historical case settlements and public court data can prove to be a secret weapon that your legal operations team can continuously sharpen with new data sets and sources.
Watch the Full ILTA YouTube Video
We want to give a big thank you to ILTA for the opportunity to have Jeff share his insights with corporate legal operations teams on selecting and using API solutions.
You can watch the full ILTA YouTube video here:
Enabling Legal Operations Innovation with the UniCourt Enterprise API
The UniCourt Enterprise API provides a single source of truth for state and federal litigation data, enabling corporate legal operations to pursue innovation with in-depth information from dockets and documents, including normalized parties, attorneys, law firms, and judges.
UniCourt’s easy-to-integrate API, comprehensive coverage, and open licensing terms are purpose-built to help legal ops teams innovate and leverage the data they need.
Speak with one of our API experts today to learn how you can use the UniCourt Enterprise API to get started tracking your litigation, enriching your experience databases, and building your proprietary LLMs.