Best Legal Datasets, Databases & APIs

What is Legal Data?

Legal data is information about the law. This data includes court records, cases, court documents, judges, attorney’s information, contact info, law firms, litigation history, and parties involved. This type of data refers to information gathered from the records of various courthouses and law firms. Legal data is based on court-validated information, and it can be used to track and update cases.

How is Legal Data collected?

Legal data is collected from different sources. These sources include news articles, government websites, and federal records centers. Due to court cases’ sensitive and often unpredictable nature, data providers must analyze and organize legal data cautiously. The legal data collected must also be updated frequently to ensure its timeliness.   
 

What are the typical attributes of Legal Data?

Legal data has a wide list of attributes. Due to the scope of laws across the world and in different jurisdictions, this list of attributes only covers the most typical aspects:

• Court data: this refers to court records, court documents, and case status.
• Law firm data: this refers to litigation history, client rosters, mergers, and name changes.
• Judge data: this refers to professional information like motions they ruled, previous cases they were involved in, and parties involved.
• Attorney data: this refers to attorney’s cases and clients, judges they’ve had contact with, their contact details and service charges.
• Party data: refers to the cases involved of particular parties, their law firms and lawyers, and contact details.  

What is Legal Data used for?

Legal data can be used by all industries, businesses, and professions. This data can improve business development and intelligence. This data can also be used in legal analytics by litigators to expose trends and patterns in past litigation that guide legal strategy and anticipate the outcome of current cases. Legal data can also be used as a background checker, as well as for tracking ongoing cases, underwriting, and investigation. Accurate and accessible legal data enables businesses to save resources and time in conducting complex legal research.
 

How can a user assess the quality of Legal Data?

The best quality legal data will have the following quality aspects. Legal data should be:

 • Use case appropriate: for legal data to be considered of the best quality, it needs to solve the users’ questions - the data must be relevant to the intended use case.
 • Dependable: the information attained from legal data needs to be reliable at all times. Because of the intricacy of cases and other law-related information, misinformation might cause serious damage to the users’ analytics and even reputation. 
 • Authentic: Legal data must be grounded in figures and facts, and data must come from validated sources.

Where can I buy Legal Data?

Data providers and vendors listed on Datarade sell Legal Data products and samples. Popular Legal Data products and datasets available on our platform are Legal ( Judicial - Court) Data | Grepsr by Grepsr, Salutary Data - B2B Legal Contacts by Salutary Data, and UniCourt Law Firm Data API - USA Legal Data on Law Firms (AI Normalized) by UniCourt.

How can I get Legal Data?

You can get Legal Data via a range of delivery methods - the right one for you depends on your use case. For example, historical Legal Data is usually available to download in bulk and delivered using an S3 bucket. On the other hand, if your use case is time-critical, you can buy real-time Legal Data APIs, feeds and streams to download the most up-to-date intelligence.

What are similar data types to Legal Data?

Legal Data is similar to Environmental Data, B2B Data, Energy Data, Real Estate Data, and Geospatial Data. These data categories are commonly used for Legal Analytics and Legal Intelligence.

What are the most common use cases for Legal Data?

The top use cases for Legal Data are Legal Analytics, Legal Intelligence, and litigation strategy.