7 Research Tools to Find Competitors’ Legal Activities
Competitive intelligence helps companies to make better decisions by understanding, and learning from, their competitors through data collection and competitor analysis.
Competitor analysis can work for legal teams as well as business teams. With so much data available, legal teams can find out with relatively little effort, what competitors have been doing in terms of litigation and other legal industry activities.
Below are some of tools with a legal focus, that we use in competitor research to help our customers analyze their competitors, understand what competitors are doing, and predict what competitors may do next.
CourtListener allows anyone to find many recent court judgments and legal opinions. These can provide an often overlooked insight into competitor activity.
Court Listener is run by the Free Law Project, who have made it their mission to provide free and public legal materials online. To search on Court Listener, you may enter your citation information or keywords into the search box.
2. CourtServe
CourtServe provides users with digital versions of essential listing documents from the Crown Courts, Civil and family courts, Royal Courts of Justice, Rolls Building, and Employment tribunals - making it useful mostly for UK-based legal monitoring. CourtServe is able to maintain a facility list which makes it a great resource when it comes to billing and other disputes.
3. Justia Dockets
Justia Dockets provides free access to federal cases, including:
Justia Legal Portal
Lawyer Directory
Daily Opinion Summaries
Mexico Legal Portal
Business Contracts
US Laws
US Supreme Court Cases
US Federal & State Regulations
Dockets & Filing
4. Lexis Nexis Public Records
Lexis Nexis serves customers in 150+ countries with a very wide range of legal (and other) tools, including visualizations and AI. Their global legal database consists of 100B+ records, with millions of new legal documents added each day. Lexis Nexis has 80B+ public record documents, and one of the largest collections of case law.
Lexis Nexis service tools provide customers with docket research, litigation analytics and practical guidance.
5. LexisNexis CourtLink
Lexis Nexis Court Link is a keyword-based search tool for searching legal records.
Keyword searching: Alongside keyword searching, customers can set up alerts to be notified of keywords found in federal civil complaints, and receive complaint documents.
Single search: With the CourtLink single search option, customers can search available federal and state court documents using a single keyword search. This helps with narrowing down results.
6. PACER
PACER will give you access to public court electronic records. PACER has 1B+ documents filed at 200+ federal courts. Access fees start at $0.10 per page. For example, charges can arise from:
Searching for a name and receiving two pages of matches. At two pages, your charge would be $0.20.
Entering your case number and selecting the docket report. If the docket is ten pages, you’ll be charged $1.00.
Selecting a link within your docket report that lets you view a document. If the PDF document is five pages long, your charge will be $0.50.
7. Westlaw
With the Westlaw legal tool you will have multiple options to choose from when conducting competitor research:
Westlaw Precision: With Westlaw precision, you can build your case strategy using legal research tools that let you conduct precise, narrowly defined research.
PeopleMap: With PeopleMap, you can discover data of public record that other resources may miss, with billions of public records from trusted sources.
Company Investigator: This tool consolidates company information from multiple sources and can be a useful shortcut in building a competitor profile.
Bottom line
It’s easy to overlook legal databases as a source of competitor information, but they can provide alternative insights not found elsewhere. Multiple vendors offer databases that aggregate a lot of information, making legal search comparatively straightforward.
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