UniCourt CEO & Co-Founder, Josh Blandi Recognized in Legal Rebels Class of 2023

By Jeff Cox on Topics: Awards

UniCourt CEO & Co-Founder, Josh Blandi Recognized in Legal Rebels Class of 2023

Great leadership is a critical ingredient of success for any company and it is the driving force behind UniCourt’s ongoing success as a leading provider of Legal Data as a Service. 

We’re thrilled to share that UniCourt’s CEO and Co-Founder, Josh Blandi, has been featured in the Legal Rebels Class of 2023 as an innovative entrepreneur in the legal technology space and a leader of the legal data market for enterprise businesses and consumers. 

In this post, we’ll share more about the origin of the Legal Rebels, who the other honorees are of the Legal Rebels Class of 2023 are, and also talk about why Josh was recognized for this prestigious achievement. 

About the Legal Rebels

Going back to 2009, the American Bar Association (ABA) Journal created the Legal Rebels project to profile lawyers and leaders in the legal industry “who aren’t waiting for change,” and to “honor the mavericks who are finding new ways to practice law, represent their clients, adjudicate cases and train the next generation of lawyers.”

For over a decade, Legal Rebels has been recognizing legal innovators and describing the changes they’re making in the legal profession by “looking at legal work with a fresh eye,” and creating “new services for a new world of law practice.”

Legal Rebels has highlighted more than 180 rebels since its inception, including several stalwarts in the ongoing battle to improve access to legal information, such as Carl Malamud and Tim Stanley. 

To be listed as a member of the Class of 2023 Legal Rebels by the ABA Journal and the ABA Center for Innovation, alongside the giants of the legal industry, is a great honor, and we’re delighted to see Josh Blandi recognized for his continued contributions to improving access to justice and making court records more accessible and useful. 

The Legal Rebels Class of 2023

In the announcement of this year’s 2023 Legal Rebels, Victor Li, Assistant Managing Editor of the ABA Journal, shares that “like previous honorees, these forward thinkers aren’t waiting for the next major disruption to hit the legal industry” – “they’re hoping to be in front of it—or in some cases, the cause of it.”

The 2023 Class of Legal Rebels includes “a married couple who created a DIY tool to not only file forms for pro se defendants but also train them to try to represent themselves in court; a former lawyer who launched an innovation incubator to assist people with various legal issues; two Yale University alumni who came up with a video platform to help inmates more easily keep in touch with loved ones and get an education; and several individuals doing work to draw attention to gaps in the court system that could be addressed by regulatory reform.” 

Here are this year’s Legal Rebels:

We also want to give a special shout out to two of the amazing women listed this year, Sonja Ebron of Courtroom5 and Natalie Anne Knowlton of IAALS. Both Sonja and Natalie have been advocating for and on the front lines of fighting for improved access to the legal system for self-represented litigants. 

In addition to their profiles in the ABA Legal Rebels included above, you can learn more about their impressive careers and achievements in their UniCourt Influencer Q&As:

Why Josh Blandi Was Selected for the Legal Rebels

More than being a successful, serial entrepreneur, who founded a legal tech company that’s nearing a decade of being in business, Josh Blandi is a trailblazing Legal Rebel because of his vision of what better access to legal data looks like and his endurance and grit to reach the finish line of disrupting the way the legal industry consumes legal data. 

Through Josh’s strategic vision to provide Legal Data as a Service (LDaaS), he has assembled a diverse, global team behind UniCourt, based both in the United States and India, including computer engineers, data scientists, physicists, AI experts, and legal professionals all working together to unlock the potential of legal data. 

Josh was also instrumental in UniCourt’s strategic pivot in 2018 to becoming an API first legal data company. Since UniCourt made the move to provide access to legal data via APIs, we’ve been able to build deeper relationships with our largest enterprise clients and gain incredibly valuable feedback that has molded our APIs into the industry leading offerings that they are today. 

As a groundbreaking pioneer in the API space for the legal industry, we’ve seen a growing number of other legal tech companies and legacy legal data providers follow our lead, and we hope to see this trend continue as we firmly believe that APIs are key to the legal industry fully leveraging the ever-expanding legal tech ecosystem and the mountains of data generated everyday.

As Amanda Robert, Legal Affairs Writer for the ABA Journal, shares in her profile on Josh for the Legal Rebels Class of 2023, Josh was key proponent of UniCourt “developing entity normalization, which seeks to tie names in court records to real-world entities.” Due to Josh’s foresight on the need to clean up legal data through the use of entity normalization, he’s positioned UniCourt as a leading innovator in this space, and the preeminent option for clean, structured data, which is foundational for accurate and trustworthy legal analytics. 

With normalized data on who the real-world attorneys, law firms, parties, and judges are, and the ability to access that data in bulk via APIs, Josh has differentiated UniCourt as the LDaaS provider with legal data you can trust for core business use cases, such as business development, litigation strategy, docketing, and process automation.

Along with this prestigious achievement from the ABA Journal and the ABA Center for Innovation, Josh has received recognition as Fastcase50 Honoree for his work in uniting a number of legal data companies around the common goal of improving access to federal court records through the PACER Collective. 

Josh’s success at bringing Legal Data APIs to market is also a central reason for UniCourt winning the Technology Award of the 2021 American Legal Technology Awards, as well as the 2021 LegalTech Breakthrough Award for Overall LegalTech Data Solution Provider of the Year, and the 2022 LegalTech Breakthrough Award for Competitive Intelligence Solution of the Year.

Want to Learn More About Using APIs in the Legal Industry?

UniCourt provides the legal industry with a comprehensive, normalized set of court data and connected public records via our APIs for business development, legal analytics, docket management, and much more.

Contact Us today and we’ll set up a time to show you how you can use APIs to enhance and modernize your legal business. 

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