UniCourt 2022 Year in Review
on Topics: Future Law | Legal Tech | News
2022 was not a banner year for the legal tech industry, with record layoffs and funding crunches, but you wouldn’t have been able to guess that from the amount of growth and expansion that UniCourt experienced throughout the entire year.
In this year’s 2022 Year In Review, we have some great stories to share with you about our growth as a company and the awards and recognition UniCourt and our senior leadership received. We’ve also gathered some of our favorite legal memes, pets of legal tech pictures, and highlights from our conference tour in 2022, and have some exciting news to share with you as well.
Compounding Growth at UniCourt
While the legal tech sector as a whole did not experience an outstanding growth phase in 2022, UniCourt more than doubled our US presence last year with incredible new hires across content, sales, product, marketing, and more.
This past year, we’ve continued to build out our world-class sales team led by our legal ninja, Anna Hascall, with new additions of Jasmine Jonell as an Account Manager, Sona Hamilton as a National Account Executive, Marisa Huber as a National Account Executive, Sarah Park as a Business Development Representative, and Yin Huang as a Solutions Engineer.
We’ve also seen significant expansion of our India presence in Mangalore to the point that we’re moving to a bigger, nearly 20,000 square foot building to accommodate for our growing teams of awesome engineers, developers, AI experts, and designers all working to unlock the power of legal data.
Beyond the growth we’ve experienced in our teams at UniCourt, we’ve also seen massive increases in the number of sign ups for UniCourt’s Legal Data as a Service offerings, and in our website traffic. In 2022, we saw UniCourt’s monthly website visits reach over 3 million views per month and signups peak at nearly 1700 per month. This is all thanks to the efforts of our amazing SEO, digital marketing, and content teams, who are dedicated to improving access to legal information for the public.
Want to join Team UniCourt? Learn more about all of the opportunities in India and across the United States on UniCourt’s Career Page.
Awards and Recognition
As 2022 began to unfold, UniCourt was highlighted as one of the seven legal tech companies to watch in 2022 by Law360 Pulse. Steven Lerner of Law360 wrote an excellent segment on UniCourt in his analysis on the seven companies to watch, and we’ve included a portion of his review here:
“As one of two court-specific legal tech companies on this list, UniCourt Inc. plays a critical role in providing lawyers access to court records and legal data.
The California-based company classifies its business model as legal data as a service, or LDaaS, and provides professionals with real-time access to litigation data. Founded in 2014, UniCourt’s platform uses automated intelligence to aid in the search of data from state and federal courts.
UniCourt’s platform has an application programming interface, or API, which can connect to a user’s applications to speed up data entry for docket management and workflow processes. The platform can identify parties, attorneys, law firms, judges and associated cases. There is also a feature that alerts users of new docket updates.”
UniCourt also received an award this year for being the Competitive Intelligence Solution of the Year in the third annual LegalTech Breakthrough Awards.
In announcing UniCourt as the winning competitive intelligence solution, Bryan Vaughn, Managing Director of LegalTech Breakthrough Awards, shared that “UniCourt breaks through the field of legal technology solutions with superior API products and a collaborative approach to working with their clients,” and that “we salute their ongoing efforts to educate the legal industry on the need for APIs to develop an ecosystem of structured data and analytics.”
Bryan also shared some insightful words on UniCourt’s underlying API-first model, noting that “APIs are how the business world moves around data to gather intelligence, build analytics, and automate processes. Well before the pandemic began upending the way the legal industry looks at legal technology and legal data, law librarians had begun developing portals using APIs. Though Legal Data APIs have been around for years, the legal industry, as opposed to finance, insurance, and investigations industries, is finally beginning to play catch up to leverage the goldmine of data APIs can unlock for legal professionals.”
On top of the recognition received from Law360 and LegalTech Breakthrough Awards, UniCourt’s CTO, Prashanth Shenoy, and our CEO, Josh Blandi, both received Outstanding Leadership Awards from the inaugural Law 2.0 conference in Dubai and Las Vegas this year.
We’re incredibly honored to see Prashanth and Josh recognized not only for their leadership within UniCourt, but also for their leadership in the broader legal tech ecosystem for having the foresight and dedication needed to bring Legal Data as a Service via APIs to the legal industry, as well as insurance, finance, investigations, and news media.
UniCourt Pets Dogs of Legal Tech
Along with the incredible new growth UniCourt experienced in 2022, we’ve also added some wonderful new furry employees!
While the Dogs of Legal Tech aren’t going anywhere, we’ve added some Cats of Legal Tech to the mix, who’ve meowed their way into UniCourt’s Pets of Legal Tech.
Say hello to Mabel, Mochi, Lazlo, and Ozzy!
Insights from UniCourt’s Influencer Q&As
UniCourt’s Influencer Q&A series is our longest running publication we’ve developed, and it is an excellent window into what’s happening on the ground in the legal industry. This year, we spoke to a number of leading legal industry influencers, including legal operations veterans, legal tech pioneers, data analytics professionals at law firms, and innovators in litigation finance.
Here are some nuggets of knowledge from this year’s influencers:
“We all know that no single tool or platform will meet all legal technology needs. When it comes to managing eDiscovery and litigation, law firms and legal departments can take advantage of the legal tech ecosystem in several ways. It behooves them to look for partners, not just platforms. As they do this, they also should work for platforms and organizations that can work together well. They also want to pick ones that stand a good chance of being around next week, next year, maybe even next decade.” George Socha
“There is a significant and growing under-consumption of legal services in the United States. Lawyers need to reexamine their business model and consider how they can leverage technology to help address the critical access to justice gap. Lawyers can use technology to work more efficiently and employ scalable legal services solutions allowing them to serve more individuals and businesses with unmet legal needs.” April Dawson
“Legal ops is how you tell the story of the value the Legal Department is bringing to the businesses. With the help of the systems and processes they implement, legal ops teams are able to collect data and metrics to tell the story of Legal.” Stephanie Corey
“The main competitive advantage of litigation finance is the possibility it provides to level the field for plaintiffs who otherwise would’ve been forced into unfair early settlements. We help take away the financial distraction so law firms and plaintiffs can really focus on building their case and getting the best settlement or verdict possible.” Gary Amos
“The data management journey never ends, and a successful program should always be evolving.” Lisa Mayo
“It’s often said that many organizations are data-rich, but information-poor. Legal Ops is the key to using the data science and analytical skills to make things actionable. We seek to illustrate trends, expose gaps – abnormal vs. normal – and let decision makers know whether a given datapoint is as expected or an outlier.” Mike Russell
“Across legal more broadly, AI will succeed where it is applied intelligently to perform tasks faster and cheaper than humans (assuming no loss of quality). We are entering an era of applied AI, where domain-specific mastery of data will be critical to success. Lawyers who can translate their domain expertise into data-centric AI solutions will be most likely to succeed.” Jamie Wodetzki
“If you want to create technology, then you must have specific experience you can generalize to work for others, too. Examine what you know and what unique skills or approaches you have. Vet your ideas and study the graveyard of failed tech before you jump in with both feet. Find someone who will be your cheerleader and accountability buddy as you build. The rest will come if you have a good solution and you stick with it.” Ivy Grey
Here’s the full list of all the Influencer Q&As from 2022:
- George Socha of Reveal-Brainspace
- Matt Patel of Malbek
- April Dawson of NCCU Law
- Stephanie Corey of UpLevel Ops
- Gary Amos of Golden Pear Funding
- Mike Russell of Expedia Group
- Jamie Wodetzki of Catylex
- David Carter of Calloquy
- Lisa Mayo of Ballard Spahr LLP
- Ivy Grey of WordRake
Legal Memes of the Year
UniCourt has continued to develop legal memes as a way to add in some brevity and fun in the legal tech space. Sometimes the best way to talk about the pain points that legal professionals face with accessing and using legal data is through a good laugh and a solid analogy, and especially if it’s a good laugh at the expense of legacy legal research providers.
Here are some of our favorite memes from 2022:
UniCourt in the News
2022 was also an excellent year for our publishing team with a three-part series on data trends in the legal industry in Legaltech News, an article in Above the Law on UniCourt’s TrueLaw Litigation Index, and the start of another three-part series on using managed services providers in Attorney at Work.
On top of our outside publications, we also saw remarkable expansion in the development of UniCourt Legal News this year with new additions to our team and new milestones in producing case summaries. Thanks to the wonderful work of Kess Hendrix, Associate Editor of UniCourt Legal News, our Legal News Analysts, and our Legal Research & Writing Interns, UniCourt reached a new height of over 450 case summaries of trending cases in state and federal courts in one month.
Here are a couple of our favorite trending case summaries written by our amazing team of legal writers:
- New York Marine and General Insurance Company v. Amber Heard
- Anthony Novak, Petitioner v. City of Parma, Ohio, et al.
- National Council of Negro Women et al v. Buttigieg et al
Apart from our outside publications and UniCourt Legal News developments, UniCourt’s Josh Blandi and Prashanth Shenoy we’re also featured in interviews with the LAWsome Podcast, hosted by Consultwebs, and StartUpMitra earlier this year.
UniCourt on Tour
There are several things that made 2022 an outstanding year for the team at UniCourt, and one that stands out above the rest was attending conferences and seeing all of our friends and colleagues in person again.
After a year of only attending a handful of conferences in 2021, UniCourt attended several insightful and productive conferences this year:
- ABA TechShow
- CLOC Global Institute
- LMA Annual Conference
- ILTACON
- Business Intelligence & Analytics in the Legal Profession
- International Legal Finance Association Annual Conference
- KM Legal
- Law 2.0
Here are some of our favorite pictures from team UniCourt on the conference circuit:
Though our conference travels were wonderful opportunities for our team to get together and meet others in the legal tech space, the undeniable highlight of team UniCourt on tour was our group trip to India.
This year, our senior leadership in the US traveled to India for two weeks to be on the ground with our colleagues based out of Mangalore. It was not only a fruitful trip with several strategy and long-range planning sessions, problem-solving marathons, and client-focused API development sessions, but it was also a fun-filled trip immersed in local cultures, cuisines, and travel destinations.
Call for Content in 2023
Interested in educating on the importance of using APIs for legal data? Want to share your experiences and expertise on the latest in legal innovation, leveraging AI and machine learning, or what’s happening in the access to justice space?
Send us your ideas for guest post content through our Contact Us page. We are always open to educational and informative guest posts. However, we do not accept paid or purely promotional content.
For a perfect example of the types of guest posts and series we’re open to, look no further than the three-part guest post series from Claire Raba Johnson that we concluded in January of 2022:
- Court Data Access Drives Legislative Change: A Story From California
- Court Record Data Shows Enduring Harm from Private Student Loan Default Judgments
- Court Record Data Access and Non-Profit Innovators Can Help Close the Justice Gap
This year, we were also thrilled to feature guest posts from Loretta Jones, VP Growth of Acceldata, and Grace Lau, Director of Growth Content at Dialpad.
What’s In Store for 2023
After eight consecutive years of continued growth at UniCourt, in large part due to the overwhelming support of our clients, we’re looking forward to expanding even more in 2023.
For a sneak peak of what’s in store for us next year, we’re still actively hiring in both the US and in Mangalore, and have some exciting announcements to make on that front in the near future.
We’re also going to be significantly ramping up our onboarding of new state courts in 2023 to expand our court coverage based on client demand, and we have some major announcements planned for our new Legal Data APIs in Q1 of 2023.
Stay tuned for all the latest news of what’s happening at UniCourt by following us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube!
From everyone at UniCourt, including Mabel, Mochi, Ozzy, and Lazlo, we wish you and yours a prosperous and Happy New Year!