The Evolution of APIs: From Nice to Have to Necessity in the Legal Industry – Josh Blandi Writes in Artificial Lawyer

APIs are a critical component for modernizing the legal industry. They’re everywhere. They touch almost every aspect of our lives in the digital world we live in, from making payments online, to booking hotels and flights, and keeping our smartphones and devices constantly updated with the latest information. 

We’re thrilled to share UniCourt CEO and Co-Founder, Josh Blandi’s latest article in Artificial Lawyer, “The Evolution of APIs: From Nice to Have to Necessity in the Legal Industry.” 

In this article, Josh explains what exactly APIs are and how they’ve evolved over time to transform the way applications talk to one another. He also hones in on how APIs have completely overhauled the banking industry by unlocking better internal data sharing, opening doorways to new partnerships and revenue streams, and improving the overall customer experience. To close out the article, Josh illustrates how the legal industry can learn from and incorporate the success banks have had with APIs to fundamentally improve the delivery of legal services and the business of law. 

Here below is an excerpt from our article in Artificial Lawyer:

APIs are everywhere. They connect you to your latest TV binge on Netflix. They’re at work when you Venmo your friend for dinner last night. Do you ask Alexa or Siri for the weather? APIs are there too. The ever-evolving ecosystem of technology and our daily lives depend on APIs to function smoothly, allowing us to stay connected in a highly-interwoven world, and they have an incredible potential to transform the legal industry and to change it for the better.

What are APIs?

APIs, or application programming interfaces, are software intermediaries.

Using programming codes, APIs allow applications and other technologies to talk to each other, share data, and build out seamless process workflows and consumer-facing profiles. For example, APIs are at work when you use PayPal to pay online. The retail site utilises an API to gather your payment data from PayPal’s interface and integrates that data with the retailer, allowing you to purchase your items without having to input your payment information. Neat, right?

The Importance of APIs

Data is exploding – it is rapidly expanding, ever-changing, and developing in a way that makes certain types of data obsolete before companies even know they have it. Many have called data the new oil. The Data as a Service (DaaS) industry, centred around the collection and utilisation of mass data sets, has harnessed this data explosion, changing the way society does business. It allows for mass, immediate understanding of consumer and competitor behaviour; the development and curation of personalised marketing campaigns; considerable cost and time savings; and faster, more evidence-based decision making.

APIs are critical to tackling the explosion of data and removing data silos, wherever they exist. They allow you to standardise, develop, and find data quickly, easily, and accurately across multiple platforms. This centralises and streamlines data collection, making mundane and time-consuming tasks as easy as entering a few key words and clicking a button. APIs allow you to automate tasks, personalise data, and cut out the noise. By recentering our ability to gather and understand data, APIs are not just adding to the data ecosystem – they’re reinventing it.

The Evolution of APIs

APIs have been around longer than you think. Starting in 2000, Salesforce, Amazon, and eBay utilised APIs to better serve their retail customers, and to feed and analyse data. Facebook and Twitter joined the fray later in 2006. The development of cloud computing restructured the use of APIs, and expanded the capabilities of every application we use today, from Instagram and Snapchat to Google Maps and Power BI.

Now, instead of relying on data packaged and contained solely within one application, applications could utilise APIs to integrate data from other applications, facilitating an explosion of possibilities. APIs became an extension to the business life-cycle, handling back-end processes and necessary data integrations. They also began to power new reporting and data analytics tools that could easily sift through mountains of data to draw insights and business intelligence.

You can read the full article here on Artificial Lawyer.

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