APIs and data lakehouses have become the pipes of the modern law firm. They are powerful tools that facilitate the movement of information quickly and at scale. But firms don’t win on plumbing alone, they win on knowledge: the context and lineage that make data trustworthy, reusable, and AI-ready.
Two persistent challenges stand out:
1. Matter intake is incomplete. Lawyer-entered forms rarely capture judges, counterparties, key events, or deal terms, leaving analytics and AI underpowered from day one.
2. Enriched data gets isolated. Even when firms add intelligence from third-party feeds, like dockets, judge profiles, SEC filings, or M&A terms it’s often trapped inside a point solution such as CRM or experience management systems. As a result, other teams are unaware of this information, leading to fragmented 'truth' across the firm. The problem isn’t usually lack of data, but rather not having access to comprehensive data at the point of decision making. This can cause the firm to miss out on critical insights.
The solution to common pitfalls?
• Break down the silos: Centralize data into a single platform where firms can ensure all stakeholders have access to the same information.
• Ensure a high quality, single source of truth: It’s crucial to address issues like mismatched IDs and changing schemas, which can lead to brittle pipelines, resulting in unreliable data and low trust. By implementing robust data governance practices, firms can ensure data is accurate and consistent. This reduces friction in data pipelines and ensures seamless integration of data from various systems, including third-party sources. Ultimately, this transforms a central repository into the firm’s single source of truth.
• Enrich Data Through APIs: To further enhance the value of their data, law firms can leverage APIs to access crucial third-party data. This enriched data is often more accurate and cost-effective than data collected internally. Typical data gaps that can be bridged with external data sources include:
o Litigation: dockets, judges, parties, case events.
o People: experts, opposing counsel, arbitrators.
o Transactions: SEC filings, precedent deal terms, comment letters.
o Private markets: company profiles, investors, funding events.
o Vendors like Docket Alarm, Courtroom Insight, Intelligize, PitchBook, and Deal Point Data make these available via APIs or feeds. The key is designing an approach that turns feeds into repeatable, governed enrichment.
• Surface Enriched Data at the Point of Decision-Making: The ability to surface accurate and consistent institutional data, enriched with third-party sources, is crucial at the decision-making point. By building data pipelines to push this data to the systems where decisions are made, organizations ensure that the information is not only accessible but also impactful, enhancing the overall decision-making process.
Dickinson Wright Case Study: Enriching Data with APIs and SALI Tagging
Dickinson Wright is a pioneer in legal data strategy, recognizing the importance of treating data as a firmwide asset. A key part of that vision was the adoption of the Entegrata lakehouse as the central platform for unifying and governing information. Building on this foundation, the firm integrated Index.IO to automatically apply SALI industry, service, and area-of-law tags. These enriched attributes flow back into the lakehouse and are distributed across core systems, creating a standardized, future-ready data layer that powers analytics, business development, and AI.
Previous State
• Manual data entry was error-prone, inconsistent, and time-intensive.
• Critical business processes, such as analytics, strategic planning, and AI enablement, were slowed by incomplete or unreliable data.
• Core systems (PMS, CRM, DMS) were not built to handle rich, multi-dimensional taxonomies, limiting segmentation and analysis.
Current/Future State
• APIs automate the tagging process, ensuring consistent alignment to SALI standards.
• Index.IO successfully back-tagged more than 200,000 historical matters, an outcome unattainable through manual processes.
• Accuracy improves while valuable resources are freed from manual data work.
• Data is stored in the Entegrata lakehouse, allowing SALI tags to combine with existing firm data and support higher-dimensional analysis.
Impact
By layering Index.IO onto its Entegrata lakehouse, Dickinson Wright has strengthened its data strategy without adding complexity or headcount. By transforming fragmented data into a unified, governed source of truth, the firm now operates on an enriched dataset that fuels analytics, business development, pricing, and predictive AI, all grounded in consistent SALI standards.
The API-First Enrichment Blueprint
1. Contract & Connect
• Confirm licensing, redistribution rights, and API limits.
• Build resilient ingestion: incremental pulls, retries/backoff, idempotent upserts.
• Normalize IDs early in an external_id_map.
2. Land Once, Use Many (Bronze → Silver → Gold)
• Bronze: Raw vendor payloads, with provenance.
• Silver: Conformed tables aligned to your legal entity model (Client, Matter, Court, Judge, Party, Event, Deal). Add SALI tags.
• Gold: Curated products like Litigation Matter 360 or Deal Terms Benchmarking—with owners, SLAs, and tests.
3. Entity Resolution & Confidence
• Deterministic matches (case number + court, SEC CIK, etc.).
• Fuzzy assists with confidence scores.
• Human-in-the-loop workflows for uncertain matches.
4. Definitions & Standards
• Publish a firmwide glossary for KPIs.
• Use a semantic layer so metrics are consistent across dashboards and AI.
• Apply SALI tags for interoperability across vendors.
5. Distribute Everywhere
•Reverse ETL: Push curated attributes back into every line of business system that needs these new codes: Experience, CRM, Accounting, Intranet, DMS, Enterprise Search, and is also available for all your custom Power BI reports and any AI you want to throw at the data.
•APIs & feature store: Support pricing, forecasting, staffing.
•RAG for AI: Ground answers in curated facts + approved docs, with citations
6. Governance & Guardrails
• Licensing: Attach vendor and usage scope at column level; enforce downstream.
• Security: Apply ethical walls and row/column policies centrally.
• Quality: Monitor match rates, coverage, freshness, and duplicates.
• Lineage: Track every field from vendor endpoint to dashboard.
A 90-Day Roadmap
Days 1–30 — Connect & Land
• Choose two feeds (e.g., dockets + SALI).
• Ingest to Bronze with retries and incremental loads.
• Define a canonical model for litigation and transactions; apply initial SALI tags.
Days 31–60 — Conform & Curate
• Build Silver tables and matching logic.
• Publish Gold #1: Litigation Matter 360 with owner, SLA, and certified dashboard.
• Wire reverse ETL into CRM/experience.
Days 61–90 — Scale & Harden
• Add a deals dataset; publish Gold #2: Deal Terms Benchmarking.
• Enable “as-of” queries for audits and fee disputes.
• Document data contracts (schema, SLAs, change management).
Metrics That Matter
• Match Rate: % of new matters enriched within 48 hours.
• Coverage: % of judges/parties with vendor IDs attached.
• Freshness: % of feeds meeting latency SLAs.
• Adoption: # of downstream systems using the same attributes.
• Lineage Completeness: % of dashboards traceable back to source.
Conclusion
Law firms don’t need perfect intake to deliver reliable insight. By enriching with APIs, landing data centrally in a lakehouse, and distributing outward, firms preserve knowledge instead of scattering it. The result: consistent facts across experience, CRM, pricing, dashboards, and AI, fueling better strategy, client outcomes, and profitability.