What Is Legal Research and Analytics?

What it is, who it’s for, and why it matters in legal tech today.

At a Glance

Legal research and analytics refers to tools and platforms that help legal professionals find, interpret, and act on legal information, from statutes and case law to litigation trends and judicial history. These tools support lawyers, researchers, and legal ops teams by making legal data more accessible, actionable, and strategic. As AI accelerates the speed and depth of legal insight, this category plays a central role in how modern legal teams perform and evaluate their work.

What Legal Research and Analytics Is and Who It’s For

Legal research and analytics tools help legal professionals access, interpret, and act on legal information, from primary sources including case law and statutes to litigation outcomes and judge-specific insights. These tools span traditional research platforms, search engines, and newer systems that apply machine learning or natural language processing to legal data. They support a wide range of users: litigators building arguments, in-house teams monitoring legal risk, and legal operations professionals seeking insight into matter trends or external counsel performance. While the research side of this category is well-established, the analytics capabilities are evolving rapidly, making this one of the most dynamic areas of legal tech.

Core Solutions

Tools in this category are designed to help legal professionals find relevant law, understand legal precedent, and surface strategic insights. Most platforms combine search and navigation features with advanced filtering, annotations, and data visualization. Analytics tools — now an integral part of many research platforms — use litigation data to identify trends, evaluate outcomes, and predict judicial behavior.

Common capabilities include:

• Full-text and natural language search across case law, statutes, and regulations

• Citation tracking and analysis tools

• Litigation analytics based on judge, court, party, or attorney history

• AI-assisted research queries and document summarization

• Visualization of legal data to support strategic planning or risk assessment

How Legal Research and Analytics Solutions Compare

Solutions in this space vary widely by scope, depth, and delivery model. Some tools focus primarily on core legal research, providing access to statutes, regulations, and case law through advanced search interfaces. Others offer deeper analytics capabilities, including judge and court behavior tracking, litigation outcome prediction, or visualized trend data. Platforms also differ in how they handle AI-driven features, such as conversational querying or automatic summarization. Buyers should consider the legal domains they operate in, the types of insights they need, and whether analytics is a nice-to-have or a core requirement. Increasingly, the lines between research and analytics are blurring, especially as vendors expand into both domains.

Challenges and Considerations

While research tools are generally easy to adopt, analytics platforms present greater challenges. Buyers often underestimate the learning curve involved in interpreting litigation data or integrating new insights into legal decision-making. Some platforms offer limited coverage or weaker support for niche jurisdictions or practice areas, which can frustrate specialized teams. Data normalization and transparency also vary widely, affecting trust in predictive tools. And while AI is unlocking powerful new capabilities, many offerings still over-promise or rely on opaque methodologies. Legal teams should approach this space with curiosity — but also clearly identify their goals and decision frameworks up front.

How AI and Automation Are Changing Legal Research and Analytics

AI is beginning to reshape how practitioners conduct legal research — and surface insights. Today’s platforms increasingly use natural language processing to refine queries, summarize results, and highlight relevant precedents. Predictive analytics tools use historical data to identify favorable forums, assess win rates, or anticipate opposing counsel strategies. Citation graphs, visualized connections, and semantic clustering are replacing linear search as the dominant exploration model. These capabilities are shifting the researcher’s primary role from exhaustive manual search to strategic synthesis, enabling lawyers to spend less time gathering information and more time interpreting it.

Future Trends

Legal research and analytics tools are likely to become more modular, interoperable, and user-personalized. As firms adopt more specialized software across functions, platforms will need to offer cleaner APIs and more flexible data structures to integrate with knowledge management systems, litigation platforms, or drafting tools. There’s growing demand for transparency in how these platforms generate and explain analytics components — especially as AI-powered outputs influence case strategy or client advice. As baseline expectations rise for the usability of the solutions and the quality of the insights, platforms will compete more based on strategic alignment than on raw content access.

Leading Vendors

Legal research and analytics spans a wide spectrum, from foundational tools that replicate traditional library access to cutting-edge platforms that surface litigation patterns, strategic risks, or citation trends. The right solution depends on how a team approaches its research process, how deeply it relies on data, and how much weight it gives to predictive or generative capabilities. The table below organizes representative vendors by their primary focus and typical buyer profile. It’s not exhaustive, but it reflects the breadth and ongoing evolution of this core legal tech category.