Lawyers.com Consumer Articles

Overview

The Lawyers.com^SM Consumer Articles API offers access to Lawyers.com^SM extensive library of legal articles to enhance your application or website providing a more robust experience for your site visitor. Lawyers.com content helps individuals better understand the law and make informed legal choices. These lawyer-written and reviewed articles are authoritative, yet easy to understand.

Service levels available:

• Basic – a free level of service. A Basic account provides access to the descriptive article title along with additional attributes or sections that clearly identify the content of the item. Sections available for display in your application include, for example, a 300 character excerpt and the area of law the article is categorized under. If you select this level of service, you must allow your users to click through to the full article hosted on the Lawyers.com. If your application is not designed to allow readers to link to these full pages, please use the premium level of service. All  Branding Guidelines  terms, including providing Lawyers.com attribution as the origin of the material, must be followed.
• Premium – a fee based service level. A Premium account provides access to the complete article including summary and body, for display directly on your site. Linking back to Lawyers.com is not required, however, all  Branding Guidelines, including providing Lawyers.com attribution as the origin of the material, must be followed.

Note: This API is currently available only via  Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket. Additionally, the Premium level of service has not been publically released. Please contact us if you are interested in the  Premium level.

Suggested Use Cases

You own a website that provides Legal-related content to end-consumers on Bankruptcy like articles, blogs, forums and more. Through this API, you can now get Lawyers.com legal articles related to Bankruptcy and show them right within your website.

You are a lawyer who specializes on Family Law. On your firm website, you can now show relevant articles on Family law when you use this API.

Steps to get Lawyers.com Articles via Windows Azure Marketplace

Once you subscribe to Lawyers.com Consumer Legal Articles data set, you will need to follow below steps to get articles related to an area of law. For illustration purposes, lets consider you are interested in getting all articles related to Family Law.

Step 1: Get Area of Law ID

The easiest way to do this is to run the Query AreasOfLaw with no input parameters. In return, you will get all the supported Areas of Law as shown below -

Get the ID corresponding to the Family Law area of law which is 748. Alternatively, you could specify input parameter AreaofLaw = Family Law. It has to be an exact string match.

At the end of step 1, you will have AreaofLawId as 748.

Step 2: Get all the article ids that relates to the Area of Law ID

Using the AreaofLawId obtained in Step 1 as input parameter for Query ArticlesAndAreasOfLaw, get all the articles related to Family Law.

At the end of step 2, you will have a list of ArticleIds as shown below -

Step 3: Get details on each article ID

For each ArticleID obtained in step 2, retrieve details like Title, Link etc from Query Articles. You can use this output within your website or application.

Response Data Elements

The following metadata elements are returned for each content item:

Sample Code

Here is a sample website that we created using the Datamarket ODATA API to pull data from the Azure SQL Server db's that host our content. The sites allow for the download of the code used to create the site (with examples for accessing the data) as well as pointers to our documentation and subscriptions in the marketplace.

http://www.lexisnexisstore.com/datamarket/lawyers

Known Issues

None at this time