Access normalized legal data enriched with public data sets using artificial intelligence.
Legal Data API
UniCourt is a leader in making court data more accessible and useful. Our Legal Data as a Service (LDaaS) via our APIs provides Fortune 500 companies and AmLaw 50 firms with bulk access to the mountain of legal data generated everyday for business development and intelligence, analytics, underwriting, case research and tracking, background checks, investigations, machine learning models, and process automation.
Why Legal Data as a Service?
Court records are siloed and messy. Accessing court records from hundreds of public databases and staying up to date on all of the latest developments in litigation you’re tracking is no small feat. Just gathering and updating the data you need on a regular basis requires hiring an army of paralegals or assembling a team of top notch engineers to automate the process.
Even if you do spend the resources and build the operation for gathering and updating your data, you’re not done yet. Court data is notoriously messy and unstructured, and nearly every court classifies cases differently. This means you’re either forced to use unreliable, unstructured data or need to hire data scientists and analysts to clean and curate your data to make it usable.
We do the heavy lifting for you
Our team of engineers have built a sophisticated platform that automates the collection of court data from hundreds of state and federal (PACER) courts across the US. We then organize, standardize, and structure that data and make it readily available via our APIs for real-time data feeds and bulk data downloads.
But that’s not all. Through our entity normalization process, powered by artificial intelligence, we use multiple public data sets, such as attorney bar data, Secretary of State data, and judicial data to identify the real-world entities involved in litigation. We also enrich our normalized court data with those other public data sets to provide you with a fuller picture of who’s who in court records and make it all available via our APIs.
Access normalized legal data enriched with public data sets using artificial intelligence.
What APIs Are Available?
Court Data APIs
Bulk access to court records, search and track cases, download court documents, update cases, and more.
Learn More
Attorney Data APIs
Get detailed information on an attorney’s cases and clients, judges they’ve faced, their contact info, and more.
Learn More
Law Firm Data APIs
Dig deeper into a law firm’s litigation history, their client roster, their attorneys, mergers and name changes, and more.
Learn More
Party Data APIs
See all of the cases involving particular parties, their go to law firms and lawyers, contact info, Secretary of State data, and more.
Learn More
Judge Data APIs
Gain insights on cases judges have heard, motions they’ve ruled on, parties who argued before them, and more.
Learn MoreHow Can You Use LDaaS?
Law Firms
- UniCourt provides the core infrastructure that law firms from AmLaw 50 firms to regional and mid-sized firms to solo practitioners use for litigation docketing and automating the process of downloading documents.
- Law firms no longer need teams of paralegals and summer associates to handle all of their docket management needs when our APIs can do the same work faster, better, and cheaper.
- Knowledge management, legal innovation, and information technology professionals within law firms are using LDaaS to power their applications and data lakes with normalized court data for developing analytics and KPIs, automating cumbersome processes, and enacting data-driven business development practices.
Litigation Support
- Whether your litigation support firm provides court reporting, service of process, translation services, trial exhibits, jury consulting, or one of the many other forms of litigation support, business development and intelligence is always top of mind.
- UniCourt’s automated court searches paired with our APIs provide you with real-time alerts when your clients are involved in litigation and when key docket events like discovery deadlines and case management conferences have been set or extended, so you can be the first to get in front of your clients.
- To save time, streamline processes, and keep your sales people ahead of the competition, litigation support firms can connect UniCourt’s APIs directly to CRMs like Salesforce to create seamless workflows.
Investigation Firms
- When it comes to PI firms running background checks or conducting due diligence, court data is a treasure trove of valuable information for locating parties and their properties, uncovering outstanding judgments and collection actions, and finding out whether individuals have been divorced, evicted, sued for fraud, or filed for bankruptcy.
- LDaaS provides investigators with bulk access to normalized court data from state and federal (PACER) courts that’s been enriched with other public data sets to include added details like party addresses and contact information.
- UniCourt’s APIs also offer background check companies and investigation firms the opportunity to create white label products powered by billions of data points that can be accessed in real-time from their client-facing applications.
Legal Department
- General Counsel, in-house counsel, and legal operations across the board are under increasing budgetary pressure to do more with less, adopt tech to curb costs, and reduce outside counsel spend - with LDaaS they achieve all three and then some.
- Legal departments within Fortune 500 businesses are using UniCourt’s APIs to automate data entry for their matters, to reduce the costs of tracking litigation at scale and proactively manage their caseload, and eliminate the time and effort required to hassle outside counsel for case updates.
- Legal ops and GCs are also using LDaaS to greatly reduce the resources required to get reliable data for analytics and reporting by leveraging normalized court data that has already been cleaned, structured, and classified with machine learning.
Finance
- Risk management is central to good business practices, and those in finance are using LDaaS to perform enhanced due diligence on borrowers to reduce their underwriting risk and avoid potential business partners mired in litigation or who have a history of being overly litigious.
- Beyond limiting risk exposure through heightened due diligence, litigation finance firms are using LDaaS to uncover new investment opportunities in state case filings with court data that has been cleaned and structured to make it easier to find the needles worth investing in.
- Whether you’re a hedge fund manager interested in developing a proprietary trading model based on new case filings or a litigation finance Managing Director looking to build a model to predict the likelihood and time to recovery for particular cases, bulk access to normalized court data gets you one step closer to making it happen.
Legal Tech
- UniCourt is a strong advocate for making court data more organized, accessible, and useful to ensure that other innovators in the legal tech space can create new and innovative products to disrupt the legal services market, better serve their clients' needs, and improve access to justice.
- Rather than spending the lion's share of their budget on data acquisition and quality assurance, legal tech companies are using LDaaS to infuse their software platforms with highly structured, normalized, and enriched court data that can be made available to their clients in real-time with our APIs.
- For legal tech firms out on the frontier, who are developing next-generation artificial intelligence, the billions of data points and millions of court documents that you can pick and choose from at your disposal through LDaaS offer excellent training data to help perfect your machine learning models.
Insurance
- From closely tracking a handful of complex bet-the-farm-cases involving your insureds to seamlessly managing case updates for thousands of insurance claims across state and federal courts in America, LDaaS provides insurance firms the ability to get detailed on-demand updates and case tracking at scale.
- Easy API access to normalized court data also enables you to avoid unnecessary risks like doing business with high risk clients who regularly sue their insurers or providing coverage in a geographical area where litigation trends clearly show a spike in case volumes impacting industries and sectors you cover.
- Effective risk management is intimately connected to predicting future loss exposure, and LDaaS provides insurance companies with bulk access to court data on past damages awards and attorneys fees for setting data-driven rates and coverage limits.
News Media
- Leading news outlets across the US from national news agencies like the Wall Street Journal to local newspapers to business journals and crypto currency reporters are already using UniCourt to gain a competitive edge in reporting the latest developments in state and federal courts.
- In addition to real-time data feeds that are more robust than Courthouse News Service (CNS) reports, UniCourt’s LDaaS offerings provide investigative journalists with the normalized court data they need to easily locate all of the court filings involving particular entities, businesses, and individuals of interest.
- Costs and convenience are important factors for news outlets in determining data sources for news stories, and UniCourt checks both boxes with our one convenient portal for state and federal court records and because we pay to aggregate data from all the civil cases filed in PACER everyday and make it available for you to download in bulk via our APIs.
UniCourt is here to make your innovation happen with LDaaS
Our engineering and analytics teams are here to support your API integrations, build out your unique use cases, and develop custom reporting tailored to your business needs.
Contact SalesFrequently Asked Questions
What are Legal Data APIs?
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are a form of technology that allows different software programs and applications to communicate. With UniCourt’s Legal Data APIs you can connect your applications to 100+ million federal (PACER) and state court records to help you automate and batch a variety of tasks.
What types of Legal Data APIs do you offer?
In addition to our suite of Court Data APIs, we also offer Attorney Data APIs, Law Firm Data APIs, Business Data APIs, and Judge Data APIs.
What can I do with your Legal Data APIs?
With UniCourt’s APIs you can perform all of the same functions that you can in our application, including searching cases, downloading court documents, tracking cases, using automated court searches, updating cases, and much more. You can also use our APIs for bulk legal data downloads.
What courts can I access with your Legal Data APIs?
You can access court data and court documents for all of the federal (PACER) courts, including U.S. District Courts, Bankruptcy Courts, and Courts of Appeals, as well as all of the state courts available in our app. Learn more about our Court Data Coverage.
What are the main use cases for Legal Data APIs?
The most common use cases for UniCourt’s Legal Data APIs across different industries are business development and intelligence, analytics, machine learning models, process automation, background checks, investigations, and underwriting.
What types of applications and technologies can I integrate your APIs with?
You can integrate our APIs with your internal applications, such as your matter management systems, CRM, document management systems, and internal legal databases. You can also integrate our APIs with your data lakes and other repositories you have developed for data collection and reporting.
Is it easy to integrate your APIs with my applications?
Yes, our APIs are easy to integrate with your applications. We provide you with extensive documentation in our Developer Hub for integrating our APIs and we also provide you with the hands-on engineering support you need.
What are Billable APIs?
UniCourt's APIs are classified into two categories - Billable and Non-Billable. Every call made to an API classified as Billable, which returns a 200 OK HTTP response, is counted towards a billable API call.
Am I limited to 1,000 API calls a month?
Premium plans allow for up to 1,000 Billable API calls every month. If you need more than 1,000 API calls per month please Contact Sales for Enterprise Plans.
Why should I use UniCourt’s APIs over others?
Unlike other legacy providers, UniCourt will not treat you like you’re just another account to be managed. Our engineering support team is available to help walk you through the process of integrating our APIs and we are also here to help make sure that your unique use cases and innovative ideas are made possible.