In 2020, ALM, publisher of legal news sites including Law.com, The American Lawyer and New York Law Journal, launched Law.com Radar, a service that delivers custom-tailored news drawn from court dockets, with a unique twist — its news summaries are generated algorithmically, then quickly reviewed by human editors.
It later added transactional news to the mix and then, last year, unveiled Trend Detection, a feature that identifies trends and patterns in the ocean of federal court litigation data, revealing where cases are surging or ebbing as they impact particular practice areas, industries, or even a single client.
Now, in a further expansion, Law.com Radar has added coverage of more than 100 state courts in California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas, with plans to quickly add more state courts over the coming weeks and months.
“Our commitment is to be in all 50 states in the next three-to-six months,” Vanessa Blum, senior director of ALM Newsroom Innovation, told me yesterday. This will include manual retrieval of new filings in states where digital coverage is not available, she said.
The coverage includes every trial-level court in Mass., N.J. and N.Y., and key courts in the other states.
Previously, Radar covered only federal courts and the Delaware Court of Chancery.
In addition to adding state courts, Radar is introducing daily case reports by jurisdiction and revamped lawsuit alerts that can be configured around courts, practice areas, topics, industry segments, law firms, parties or free-text searches.
Users can set the frequency of alerts to be notified immediately, hourly, daily or weekly.
The daily case reports provide a round-up of new commercial litigation from any court available in Law.com Radar.
“State court filings are vitally important to the lawyers and law firms that use Law.com Radar and the courts can be challenging to monitor,” Blum said. “Our team is doing the work of collecting just-filed complaints from courthouses across the country and surfacing them with the context that enables users to act quickly on opportunities.”
For the time being, there is no additional charge to access the state court information. An FAQ on Law.com Radar says there will be no charge “until we have reached a critical mass of courts.”
Currently, Radar offers both a free and a paid subscription tier. The free version includes federal litigation updates, headlines from Law.com, the ability to follow practice areas and regions, breaking news notifications, and daily and weekly digest emails.
The premium version, which costs $19.99 a month, adds the ability to link to complaint documents, the state court updates, customizable new-suit alerts, access to the Trend Detection feature, coverage of corporate transactions, and more.
Most stories in Law.com Radar are produced using data processing and what ALM describes as “algorithmic journalism.” Radar converts raw court data into short, easy-to-read summaries using natural language generation technology. Editors then review each summary to ensure accuracy. By combining automation with human review, Radar says, it is able to connect readers with the information they need as quickly as possible.
Related:
- Coming Soon: AI-Driven, Personalized Legal News from ALM.
- ALM Updates Its Legal Radar ‘Automated Journalism’ Product with New Name, New Content and New Pricing.
- New Beta Feature of Law.com Radar Uses Algorithm to Detect Trends and Surges in Litigation News.
