It was just 18 months ago that I wrote about the legal research startup Midpage passing what its founder considered a critical threshold in its development, achieving full data coverage of key U.S. case law. Now the company is crossing another threshold, adding full coverage of the other major chunk of primary law \u2014 statutes, [\u2026]<\/p>\n
It was just 18 months ago that I wrote about the legal research startup Midpage<\/a> passing what its founder considered a critical threshold in its development, achieving full data coverage of key U.S. case law<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now the company is crossing another threshold, adding full coverage of the other major chunk of primary law \u2014 statutes, regulations, constitutions and agency guidance for all 50 states and the federal government.<\/p>\n For Midpage founder and CEO Otto Zastrow<\/a>, the release is the company\u2019s most significant since it launched its Midpage Data<\/a> service six months ago, because it means that both lawyers and the growing number of legal tech companies that license Midpage\u2019s data can now get comprehensive primary law \u2014 case law and codified law alike \u2014 from a single source.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the entire world of people building things in legal tech, they can now get both of these pieces from one place,\u201d Zastrow told me in an interview earlier this week. \u201cWe\u2019re pretty sure that this is the highest quality and highest coverage dataset for U.S. regulations out there.\u201d<\/p>\n The expansion adds more than 4 million statutes, regulations and agency guidance documents to a database that already includes more than 14 million published and unpublished opinions, connected by what the company says are more than 111 million links between opinions, according to a data quality page<\/a> the company published on its website.<\/p>\n As I wrote in February 2025, Midpage \u2014 which was a 2025 finalist in the Startup Alley competition<\/a> I run at ABA Techshow and which raised $4 million last June<\/a> \u2014 chose to build its own case law database largely from scratch rather than license it from an established provider.<\/p>\n It has now taken the same approach to codified law, collecting statutes and regulations directly from primary sources rather than through vendors or intermediaries.<\/p>\n According to the company\u2019s public coverage page<\/a>, the dataset now spans statutes, administrative codes and constitutions for U.S. states, territories and the District of Columbia, together with the United States Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, the Federal Register, executive orders, and public laws on the federal side.<\/p>\n It also includes a substantial body of federal agency guidance \u2014 materials such as IRS revenue rulings and private letter rulings, SEC no-action letters, the USPTO\u2019s patent and trademark examination manuals, Department of Labor opinion letters, and guidance from the CFPB, EEOC, FDA, HUD, OFAC and USCIS, among others.<\/p>\n This kind of depth matters for practitioners in specialized areas, Zastrow said. \u201cIf you\u2019re, say, a litigator working on tax litigation, it\u2019s really important that all of the things are in there \u2014 that all the tax codes are in there.\u201d<\/p>\n Zastrow says it is not just the breadth of the data that matters, but also its quality. He compare Midpage\u2019s collection against those of both open source providers and major incumbents.<\/p>\n Open data efforts such as the Free Law Project\u2019s CourtListener have made primary law far more accessible, he said, but they do not include statutes or regulations, and their court coverage has gaps in areas such as tax courts. \u201cEven though they were doing God\u2019s work for many decades, for commercial real-world litigation, it\u2019s just not good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Lexis and Westlaw, meanwhile, have the data, but a vendor \u201ccouldn\u2019t build on top of that data,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Zastrow said that the quality of Midpage\u2019s data is driven by two factors.<\/p>\n The first is versioning. Every statute and regulation in the collection is stored with its historical versions, so a researcher can see not just the current text but the text as it stood on any given date. This is critical, Zastrow said, for a litigator who needs to know which version of a statute a case was relying on.<\/p>\n In one example on the data quality page, a West Virginia wage regulation is available in 39 point-in-time versions, with scanned tables rebuilt as clean HTML.<\/p>\n The second is freshness. \u201cUnlike many others, we actually update all of our collections weekly, and for cases, we\u2019re doing it multiple times per day,\u201d Zastrow said.<\/p>\n For statutes and regulations, he said, the company re-scans entire collections every week, pulling directly from each state\u2019s own websites. \u201cWe\u2019re not going through any vendors or intermediaries,\u201d he said, and the company does no book scanning.<\/p>\n One wrinkle in the 50-states coverage involves the handful of states whose official codes are published only through LexisNexis \u2014 a situation familiar to anyone who followed Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org<\/a>,<\/em> Carl Malamud\u2019s fight over access to the Official Code of Georgia Annotated that reached the Supreme Court in 2020.<\/p>\n For those states, Zastrow told me, Midpage is reconstructing the codes from the underlying session laws and acts, rather than taking the text from the Lexis-published versions.<\/p>\n As of today\u2019s release, that work will be complete for most states, with the New Jersey Administrative Code and the Code of Vermont Rules scheduled to be live today. Still in progress are the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the Tennessee Code Annotated, the Mississippi Code, and the Arkansas Code.<\/p>\n Alongside the statutes release, Midpage also recently rolled out on-demand retrieval of PACER dockets<\/a> and filings from federal district, bankruptcy and appellate courts. Zastrow said the company built its own PACER integration after finding that third-party APIs \u201cweren\u2019t quite accurate enough.\u201d<\/p>\n The feature is designed for agentic workflows, so that a user working in Midpage\u2019s own interface \u2014 or through its integrations in Claude, ChatGPT or Perplexity \u2014 can instruct the AI to pull a docket sheet or a cited filing, which the AI can then read and use, for example, to verify that a citation and quotation in a brief are accurate.<\/p>\n Because PACER charges for every document, Midpage cannot make the underlying retrieval free, but rather than requiring users to supply their own PACER credentials, it retrieves documents through its own account and passes the fees through to the customer.<\/p>\n Subscribers to Midpage\u2019s Pro plan get $25 per month in PACER usage credits. Higher-level subscribers can negotiate custom credit levels.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were many types of tasks for which a partner would have a dedicated associate that would spend many hours per week on this,\u201d Zastrow said. \u201cThey can now do it in a simple chat message.\u201d<\/p>\n Notably, Zastrow said that usage of Midpage through its Claude integration is now roughly twice as large as usage through its own web interface \u2014 and growing faster. The new statutes and regulations are available across all of those channels, both for search and for direct lookups, as well as through browsable navigation on the platform itself.<\/p>\n Coming soon, Zastrow said, is hyperlinking between documents. The company has already done much of the work to link cases that cite other cases, with clickable links to follow. Links from cases to the statutes they cite will come next, and statute-to-statute links after that.<\/p>\n Also on the roadmap is coverage of proposed bills at the state level, which the company currently offers only for federal legislation.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Midpage\u2019s data services business continues to add customers. Zastrow named BriefCatch<\/a> and GC AI<\/a> as newly announced customers, joining others it cannot yet disclose. The data quality page says five multibillion-dollar organizations now use its data.<\/p>\n Pointing to Midpage\u2019s public listing of the resources it covers, Zastrow took a shot at some other newer entrants to the legal research market, which he said do not always have the coverage they claim to have.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s why we said we\u2019re going to make everything very interactive and transparent,\u201d he said. He wants people to click around and judge the coverage for themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was just 18 months ago that I wrote about the legal research startup Midpage passing what its founder considered a critical threshold in its development, achieving full data coverage of key U.S. case law. Now the company is crossing another threshold, adding full coverage of the other major chunk of primary law \u2014 statutes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":157944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawsite"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Midpage-Home-7-22-26-1024x576-37TlxC.png?fit=1024%2C576&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What the Coverage Includes<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Quality Differentiator<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Lexis-Published States<\/strong><\/h3>\n
PACER On Demand<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Distribution Through AI Assistants<\/strong><\/h3>\n