Law Insider Search API Introduction

The Law Insider API gives you API access to the same documents as the online Law Insider search https://www.lawinsider.com/search. It's designed so you can built this search function in your own product or otherwise use it from your own programs.

The API uses ElasticSearch. ElasticSearch is one of the world's most popular database for storing JSON documents. Here we give lots of examples and plenty of explanations to get you up and running as fast as possible.

REQUEST ACCESS TO SEARCH API

The Power of ElasticSearch

ElasticSearch gives you access to very low-level details of the search API. That means it has a lot of power. It takes some effort to understand all of it. But the good news it is fairly easy to get started with the most common search operations. Some of the advanced features let you:

  1. Reorder the results of search results lots of different ways. You might do this if you want to, for example, list at the top something that otherwise might be listed further down the list.
  2. Do aggregations, meaning calculate totals and subtotals.
  3. Boost the relative importance of words and phrases and do so with a very fine-grained level of access.
  4. Write searches that stipulate that the order of words is important in a phrase and not just the presence of these words.
  5. Turn on various debugging tools and add search metrics so you can understand why documents are matching your search or not matching.

ℹ️ Quick Start ℹ️

We have these three sections to get you up and running quickly:

  1. Law Insider Quick Start Tutorial—provides a beginner's introduction to ElasticSearch queries. Law Insider uses the ElasticSearch query language.
  2. Basic Queries—gives an example for each of the most common search types.
  3. All Documents Queries—is an inventory of all the document types found in Law Insider. Also shows some advanced ElasticSearch searches.

ElasticSearch Query DSL

The ElasticSearch query language is called ElasticSearch Query DSL. Start with our complete tutorial.

Get Law Insider Credentials

You do not use regular ElasticSearch credentials. Instead, you use a token which you add to the URL like this:

https://www.lawinsider.com/api/v1alpha/search?token=<token>

Use this form to request a token.