What is legal data? Discover legal datasets and law firm databases

Legal Data Explained

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.