It was simply 18 months in the past that I wrote in regards to the authorized analysis startup Midpage passing what its founder thought of a crucial threshold in its improvement, attaining full data coverage of key U.S. case law.
Now the corporate is crossing one other threshold, including full protection of the opposite main chunk of main regulation — statutes, laws, constitutions and company steerage for all 50 states and the federal authorities.
For Midpage founder and CEO Otto Zastrow, the discharge is the corporate’s most vital because it launched its Midpage Data service six months in the past, as a result of it implies that each legal professionals and the rising variety of authorized tech firms that license Midpage’s knowledge can now get complete main regulation — case regulation and codified regulation alike — from a single supply.
“For your entire world of individuals constructing issues in authorized tech, they’ll now get each of those items from one place,” Zastrow advised me in an interview earlier this week. “We’re fairly positive that that is the very best high quality and highest protection dataset for U.S. laws on the market.”
The growth provides greater than 4 million statutes, laws and company steerage paperwork to a database that already consists of greater than 14 million printed and unpublished opinions, linked by what the corporate says are greater than 111 million hyperlinks between opinions, in response to a data quality page the corporate printed on its web site.
As I wrote in February 2025, Midpage — which was tech-startups-selected-for-the-2025-startup-alley-at-aba-techshow.html”>a 2025 finalist within the Startup Alley competitors I run at ABA Techshow and which raised $4 million last June — selected to construct its personal case regulation database largely from scratch moderately than license it from a longtime supplier.
It has now taken the identical method to codified regulation, accumulating statutes and laws immediately from main sources moderately than by way of distributors or intermediaries.
What the Protection Contains
In keeping with the corporate’s public coverage page, the dataset now spans statutes, administrative codes and constitutions for U.S. states, territories and the District of Columbia, along with the US Code, the Code of Federal Rules, the Federal Register, govt orders, and public legal guidelines on the federal facet.
It additionally features a substantial physique of federal company steerage — supplies corresponding to IRS income rulings and personal letter rulings, SEC no-action letters, the USPTO’s patent and trademark examination manuals, Division of Labor opinion letters, and steerage from the CFPB, EEOC, FDA, HUD, OFAC and USCIS, amongst others.
This type of depth issues for practitioners in specialised areas, Zastrow stated. “In case you’re, say, a litigator engaged on tax litigation, it’s actually vital that all the issues are in there — that each one the tax codes are in there.”
The High quality Differentiator
Zastrow says it’s not simply the breadth of the information that issues, but additionally its high quality. He examine Midpage’s assortment towards these of each open supply suppliers and main incumbents.
Open knowledge efforts such because the Free Legislation Mission’s CourtListener have made main regulation way more accessible, he stated, however they don’t embrace statutes or laws, and their courtroom protection has gaps in areas corresponding to tax courts. “Regardless that they have been doing God’s work for a lot of many years, for industrial real-world litigation, it’s simply not ok.”
Lexis and Westlaw, in the meantime, have the information, however a vendor “couldn’t construct on high of that knowledge,” he stated.
Zastrow stated that the standard of Midpage’s knowledge is pushed by two elements.
The primary is versioning. Each statute and regulation within the assortment is saved with its historic variations, so a researcher can see not simply the present textual content however the textual content because it stood on any given date. That is crucial, Zastrow stated, for a litigator who must know which model of a statute a case was counting on.
In a single instance on the information high quality web page, a West Virginia wage regulation is on the market in 39 point-in-time variations, with scanned tables rebuilt as clear HTML.
The second is freshness. “In contrast to many others, we really replace all of our collections weekly, and for instances, we’re doing it a number of occasions per day,” Zastrow stated.
For statutes and laws, he stated, the corporate re-scans complete collections each week, pulling immediately from every state’s personal web sites. “We’re not going by way of any distributors or intermediaries,” he stated, and the corporate does no e book scanning.
The Lexis-Printed States
One wrinkle within the 50-states protection entails the handful of states whose official codes are printed solely by way of LexisNexis — a state of affairs acquainted to anybody who adopted Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Carl Malamud’s combat over entry to the Official Code of Georgia Annotated that reached the Supreme Court docket in 2020.
For these states, Zastrow advised me, Midpage is reconstructing the codes from the underlying session legal guidelines and acts, moderately than taking the textual content from the Lexis-published variations.
As of at the moment’s launch, that work might be full for many states, with the New Jersey Administrative Code and the Code of Vermont Guidelines scheduled to be dwell at the moment. Nonetheless in progress are the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the Tennessee Code Annotated, the Mississippi Code, and the Arkansas Code.
PACER On Demand
Alongside the statutes launch, Midpage additionally not too long ago rolled out on-demand retrieval of PACER dockets and filings from federal district, chapter and appellate courts. Zastrow stated the corporate constructed its personal PACER integration after discovering that third-party APIs “weren’t fairly correct sufficient.”
The characteristic is designed for agentic workflows, so {that a} consumer working in Midpage’s personal interface — or by way of its integrations in Claude, ChatGPT or Perplexity — can instruct the AI to tug a docket sheet or a cited submitting, which the AI can then learn and use, for instance, to confirm {that a} quotation and citation in a quick are correct.
As a result of PACER fees for each doc, Midpage can not make the underlying retrieval free, however moderately than requiring customers to provide their very own PACER credentials, it retrieves paperwork by way of its personal account and passes the charges by way of to the shopper.
Subscribers to Midpage’s Professional plan get $25 per 30 days in PACER utilization credit. Increased-level subscribers can negotiate customized credit score ranges.
“There have been many varieties of duties for which a associate would have a devoted affiliate that may spend many hours per week on this,” Zastrow stated. “They’ll now do it in a easy chat message.”
Distribution By AI Assistants
Notably, Zastrow stated that utilization of Midpage by way of its Claude integration is now roughly twice as giant as utilization by way of its personal internet interface — and rising sooner. The brand new statutes and laws can be found throughout all of these channels, each for search and for direct lookups, in addition to by way of browsable navigation on the platform itself.
Coming quickly, Zastrow stated, is hyperlinking between paperwork. The corporate has already completed a lot of the work to hyperlink instances that cite different instances, with clickable hyperlinks to comply with. Hyperlinks from instances to the statutes they cite will come subsequent, and statute-to-statute hyperlinks after that.
Additionally on the roadmap is protection of proposed payments on the state degree, which the corporate at the moment gives just for federal laws.
In the meantime, Midpage’s knowledge companies enterprise continues so as to add prospects. Zastrow named BriefCatch and GC AI as newly introduced prospects, becoming a member of others it can not but disclose. The info high quality web page says 5 multibillion-dollar organizations now use its knowledge.
Pointing to Midpage’s public itemizing of the assets it covers, Zastrow took a shot at another newer entrants to the authorized analysis market, which he stated don’t all the time have the protection they declare to have.
“That’s why we stated we’re going to make the whole lot very interactive and clear,” he stated. He needs folks to click on round and choose the protection for themselves.
