Schedule a Demo

Law Insider SQL API Introduction

Suggest Edits

Law Insider SQL API is an API that lets you write Google BigQuery code to query the objects in Law Insider. BigQuery uses SQL, so it will be familiar to most programmers.

With SQL API you can:

  • Automate data capture at scale to reduce document processing costs.
  • In addition to querying the repository data directly in BigQuery, you can export it to an open formats, including AVRO, CSV, JSON, PARQUET.
  • Take advantage of the same machine learning and natural language processing pipeline that powers LawInsider.com to drive new insights from directly accessing the data hidden in your documents.

Request API Access

API access is FREE for Private Contract Repositories with at least 1,000 uploaded documents.

If you are looking to acquire API access to Law Insider SEC repository, please email [email protected]

SCHEDULE A DEMO

Sample Data

You can get some sample contracts here to load to a private repository to experiment with the API.

Use Cases

Here are some ways you might use the SQL API.

  • Use SQL to query the same SEC Repository that is published on LawInsider.com or upload your own contracts and other documents by creating a Private Contract Repository.
  • Automatically organize documents into one of thousands of categories.
  • Compare clauses and definitions across all of your agreements for consistency.
  • Drive innovation with unique and proprietary data extracted from your own documents.
  • Merge documents from multiple different document sources into one canonical repository or create many repositories for different groupings of documents.
  • Join document data with other analytics data.
  • Search clause snippets, paragraphs, or the full document text.

Data Processing

Here we explain how contracts, with widely varying formats, are parsed into a standard format and stored in Law Insider. This relies heavily on machine learning to assemble all of this disparate data into a common format to make is possible to query using a single SQL syntax.

Document processing begins once documents have been uploaded to a Private Contract Repository. Law Insider uses machine learning, OCR, and natural language processing to add structure to the extracted data in documents.

The following diagram gives a high-level view of the Law Insider data processing and publishing pipeline.

As you can see, data can be read from a local drive, DropBox, or Google Drive and stored in BigQuery or Google Sheets or both.

Data Publishing

The Law Insider SQL API uses Google Cloud Platform's BigQuery (video) for secure data publishing.

BigQuery is Google's serverless data warehouse that is designed to help you turn big data into valuable business insights.

You access your data in BigQuery by using the Google Cloud console, by using the BigQuery command-line tool, or by making calls to the BigQuery REST API. There are also a variety of client libraries, including such as Node.js, Java, .NET, and Python.

The following diagram shows adding a linked dataset to your project and querying it. The dataset is the BigQuery data and the link is the connection from the console to the dataset.

Google BigQuery Console

In the console it looks like this:

Request SQL API Access

API access is FREE for Private Contract Repositories and requires a repository with at least 1,000 uploaded documents.

If you are looking to acquire API access to Law Insider SEC repository, please email [email protected].

SCHEDULE A DEMO

Updated 23 days ago