Law.com Radar vs. Courthouse News Service

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Courthouse New Service is an established provider of new suit alerting. If you’re considering an enterprise subscription to Law.com Radar, odds are you’re already using Courthouse News Service (CNS) and are seeking an alternative that’s easier to work with and more effective at delivering critical litigation intelligence.

Maybe you’re curious about a solution that leverages advances in technology to deliver information faster. You may be looking for ways to control your department’s budget or add efficiency by replacing voluminous emails with more targeted alerting on specific companies and legal areas. 

At Law.com, we talk with our law firm and corporate clients every day and understand the pain points you experience when using legacy litigation alerting tools. Those conversations—and your feedback along the way—led us to develop Law.com Radar.

So let’s get into the ways these products are similar and where there are key differences.

How Are Law.com Radar and Courthouse News Service Similar?

There are three basic areas where Radar and CNS overlap. These are:

• Extensive federal and state court coverage
• New suit alerting
• Light research tools

Both services provide alerting on newly filed cases in thousands of federal and state trial courts. While numerous tools exist for legal research, Courthouse News Service and Law.com Radar are recognized for their breadth of coverage in regional trial courts. Unlike the mega research platforms, Law.com Radar and CNS employ on-the-ground researchers in hard-to-access courts for coverage that extends beyond what’s digitally available. Additionally, Radar alerts and CNS dingers both include short editorial summaries of new cases that help users scan for the cases they care about. Finally, both platforms offer tools that enable users to search their vast databases of case information.

How Are Law.com Radar and CNS Different?

Since Law.com Radar and Courthouse News Service have a number of similarities, it’s useful to consider how they differ. Here are seven core areas where the two platforms are different:

• Access to complaint docs
• Full complaint text search
• Standardized case types
• Trend awareness
• Data enrichment
• User interface
• Customer service

1 Access to complaints

• Law.com Radar: With Law.com Radar, complaint access is free and seamless. For the majority of new cases, a complaint document is accessible in one click from your search screen or alert email reducing delays and hassle. When a complaint isn’t immediately available, users can request the document and the Radar team promptly fulfills requests with no additional fees. You will never see a pass-through charge or courier fee. 

• Courthouse News Service: Document access is spotty and customer requests incur hefty fees. Based on what we hear from customers, the unpredictability of add-on fees forces administrators to restrict access and means that internal teams spend limited time and resources chasing down documents.

2 Full complaint text search

• Law.com Radar: Law.com Radar enables users to search complaints for important keywords and references. This feature makes it possible to surface cases based on information that isn’t part of case metadata and is crucial for identifying hard-to-spot cases

• Courthouse News Service: Courthouse News Service recently introduced features to search complaint documents. However, early customer feedback is that CNS doesn’t collect enough complaints in real time to make that feature useful for alerting. 

3 Standardized case types

• Law.com Radar: Law.com Radar makes it possible to search across state and federal courts using a set of detailed, normalized labels based on the taxonomy developed by the groundbreaking SALI Alliance. This process goes beyond simple mapping and incorporates a proprietary AI model that categorizes cases based on complaint text. Law.com Radar’s SALI tags make it simple to search for cases in specific areas or to keep out unwanted case types such as auto negligence or slip-and-fall cases.

• Courthouse News Service: Courthouse News Service doesn’t offer standardized classification of cases except federal Nature of Suit codes. This makes it challenging to create CNS dingers that are effective in both state and federal courts. With CNS there’s no easy way to exclude high-volume and undesirable case types. Based on what we hear from customers, the only option for this type of sophisticated searching with Courthouse News Service is to develop a complex Boolean search that attempts to cover every conceivable term.

4 Trend awareness

• Law.com Radar: Only Law.com Radar offers proprietary Trend Detection features that expose shifts and patterns in case filings before they become visible to the human eye. Law.com Radar’s award-winning Trend Detection system works by analyzing federal litigation data in real-time and applying specialized algorithms that find statistical trends and anomalies in case volume. Subscribers receive exclusive access to the trends and surges surfaced by this cutting edge system.

• Courthouse New Service: Courthouse News Service doesn’t offer any tools for trend identification.

5 Data enrichment

• Law.com Radar: Law.com Radar uses advanced data processing to enrich litigation data with company and law firm IDs, industry tags, SALI claim labels and more. This makes Radar data exceptionally powerful for new suit alerting as well as for client, competitor and trend analysis.
• Courthouse News Service: To our knowledge, Courthouse News Service doesn’t conduct data enrichment.

6 User interface

• Law.com Radar: Law.com Radar’s screens are modern and intuitive. Whether you’re consuming information at a desktop or on your mobile device, it’s easy to search and set up alerts. This makes Radar a more effective tool for business development professionals, litigators and support staff.
• Courthouse News Service: Customers describe Courthouse News Service (and its newer Case Portal interface) as clunky and difficult to use. It’s generally only put in the hands of experienced researchers who are comfortable with complex search queries.

7 Customer service

• Law.com Radar: From onboarding to set-up and adoption, Law.com Radar provides exceptional customer service that ensures your team sees real value. As part of ALM and the Law.com product suite, Law.com Radar customers can always reach an account rep or product expert who goes above and beyond to address customer inquiries and concerns. 
• Courthouse News Service: Customers are frustrated by lack of support, unaddressed feedback and difficulties getting issues resolved.

But what if I’m already a Courthouse News Service subscriber? Won’t it be difficult to switch services?

The Law.com Radar team is experienced in migrating alerts set up in other litigation research platforms to Law.com Radar. If your organization is replacing a legacy alerting platform and requires migration as part of onboarding support, we can provide a smooth transition and will work together during the migration to ensure minimal disruption. During your migration, our team will consult on alert configuration and can help refine your alert queries to deliver more relevant cases. 

Ready to learn more about Law.com Radar? Contact us here to set up a trial.