Thomson Reuters has today announced that data from Westlaw Edge Litigation Analytics and Practical Law will be made available through application programming interfaces (APIs).
By leveraging Thomson Reuters Legal Data APIs, legal labourers can combine Thomson Reuters data with their own internal data to ‘get a more comprehensive view and gain greater insights’, said the company.
What this means is that firms will now be able to run an enterprise search across an organisation’s content, know-how on Practical Law, and additional sources in a single query.
Additionally, the work product of the firm or legal department can be integrated with Practical Law know-how resources.
Tony Kinnear, president of Thomson Reuters Legal Professionals, said: ‘Co-developing side by side with innovative customers to provide our editorially curated content through APIs allows us to deliver entirely new capabilities through a more open and collaborative approach.’
An example of a firm that has already tapped this capability is BakerHostetler, which has been connecting with Westlaw’s Edge litigation analytics platform.
Katherine Lowry, director of Practice Services for BakerHostetler and lead of IncuBaker, part of the firm’s newly launched Digital Assets and Data Management Group, said: ‘Working with [the] Westlaw Edge Litigation Analytics API creates opportunities for us to join their expansive data with our internal data for seamless integration, and incorporating it as part of our initiative is a major step in the right direction.’
Is this a big deal? Well, it certainly makes sense in terms of allowing firms that want to do more with legal data to go ahead and experiment. And it may end up making law firms’ relationships with Thomson Reuters even more sticky – as they will remain at the centre of the ‘legal data economy’.
P.S. the move is also interesting given the recent acquisition of HighQ – a data sharing platform…