26 November 2020
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"UniCourt provide access State and Federal Court data and it offer real-time access to this data"

Alvaro Navarro Sotillos, Editor in Chief of The Impact Lawyers Magazine, had the pleasure to conduct a phone interview with Jeff Cox.

Jeff Cox is the Director of Content & Data Acquisition at UniCourt Inc. UniCourt is a SaaS offering using machine learning to disrupt the way court records are organized, accessed, and used. UniCourt connects clients to the records they need and enable them to tap into the mountain of court data generated every day for legal analytics, business intelligence and development, background checks, research and many other innovative uses.

Does UniCourt offer services only for lawyers?

When a lot of people needs data, we count with a lot of companies with this information, specifically in insurance, finance, there are several companies using data, we also have real estate companies, we also have litigation support companies. It is a very broad range, different types of businesses, including law firms. 

How did you come up with the idea of UniCourt?

Originally, UniCourt started as a business development tool. The founders created another company after the Great Recession, after 2008, to help people to reduce the debt and it was successful. They needed to find more clients, so they started looking to court data and this project come up very well and this is why they created another company.

What are the main characteristics and functions of UniCourt?

Our main function is legal data as a service. An Application Programming Interface (API), it’s basically a pipeline to move data between different systems.

In which countries do you have the biggest demand for UniCourt services?

We are really operating in the United States. We only provide access to US Court Data. 

Are you expecting to expand your project?

There are 50 different states in the US, and we are continually adding more states into our platform, so in the next couple of years, we are still adding State Court records. 

Are you carrying all the Jurisdictions?

We provide access to several states (Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Texas, and New York). If you go to our website, you will get a lot of information about this. We provide access to Federal Courts for all the states, but for the actual state court records, we only have right now these different states.

How are the main clients of UniCourt? Do you offer services to all kinds of law firms? 

Yes, we have some of the biggest firms and we also offer services to solo practitioners, so we have a very broad range of different users. Big firms have used us to get all access to Data, using an API. Our API basically connects our system to their internal applications, so they can basically infuse their databases with hundreds of millions of data points

Which are the main legal documents that UniCourt offer?

In our platform the main content that we provide is access to Court documents and other information related to Courts. In the UniCourt platform users could update cases every time and they can also download documents.  UniCourt platform works really fast, this is one of the things that I like the most to the users. Our System contacts the Court every day and it finds new information related to Courts

Why is the mechanism to get these legal documents?

These documents come from the Federal Court System and all of the US District Courts are combined with one bog database but it’s difficult to use this database and very expensive

Every day, UniCourt system puts all the information for all the new cases that are filled. It grabs thousands and thousands of cases every day. This system has an interface that could publish real-time information. This system contacts the Government database and automatically download the documents

What are the main benefits of using UniCourt?

In UniCourt we provide a portal to access State and Federal Court data, also we offer real-time access to this data and we offer this data selected through machine learning. One of the things that are really helpful for lawyers is that we clean up all the data that we have with our artificial intelligence, so lawyers don’t have to spend time searching for names or other information when we are looking at Court documents

How do you control the security of the data generated through the platform?

We do not manage handled customer data. We only provide access to information and these are public records that are in the public domain. All the information that we have in the platform is not personal information, there are public records. 

You can enjoy UniCourt services here
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