Data Integrations and APIs – Landscape Overview

Data APIs and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are the two principal routes through which structured legal data moves between systems. APIs have served this function for over a decade, letting firms pull court dockets, filings, regulatory updates, patent data, and more from external providers into their own platforms. MCP, an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 and now adopted by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and a broad ecosystem of legal tech vendors, does a similar job for AI systems, giving assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot standardized, natural-language access to the same data sources. Together, the two protocols form the infrastructure layer on which legal AI depends.