The search API that keeps legal and compliance AI up to date and defensible

Legal AI products need a retrieval layer that covers both court decisions and material published after a model's training cutoff. The Exa Search API searches 9M+ US court opinions together with the live web, so a single query can return a controlling decision, the regulation behind it, and recent agency guidance. Each result includes the source URL and the relevant text, ready to pass to your model.

Exa's Search API covers 9M+ full-text US federal and state court opinions, with court, docket, and citation metadata, and 9.7M+ granted US patents with claims, inventors, and assignees. It also searches statutes, regulations, agency guidance, enforcement releases, SEC filings, and legal news across the open web. All of it sits behind one Search API, so a compliance tool can find a company's latest disclosure, the rule it refers to, and recent news coverage without building a separate integration for each source.

Fabricated citations happen when a model answers from memory instead of from documents it actually retrieved. The fix is to ground every answer in sources fetched at query time and to have the model cite only those sources. The Exa Search API returns a URL and the page text with each result, so every citation in your product's answer can point to a source a user can check.

Yes. List the sites and publishers to search with includeDomains, or drop sources with excludeDomains. You can restrict a query to a state legislature's site or a federal agency, or exclude commentary sites when you only want primary sources. Add published-date filters to keep results current. Every result comes back with its URL, so each answer links to the page it came from.

Keyword search only finds documents that contain the exact terms you entered, and legal language varies a lot across courts, agencies, and decades. Semantic search matches on what a passage means. A query about an employer misclassifying gig workers can turn up an agency interpretation that never uses the word “gig.” The Exa Search API is built on this kind of retrieval, which helps legal AI find authority a keyword tool would miss.

A prior art search looks for anything published before a filing date that describes the same invention, whether that's a patent, a paper, or a product page. Inventors and examiners often describe the same idea in completely different terms, so keyword searches miss relevant art. The Exa Search API covers 9.7M+ granted US patents and 350M+ academic papers along with the open web, and a published-date filter limits results to material that came out before your filing date. The Exa Agent API can run a multi-step search from a plain description of the invention and return the closest references with citations.

Regulatory change management is the process of tracking new laws, rules, and guidance, figuring out which ones affect your organization and updating policies to match. The slowest part is usually finding the changes at all, since they're spread across hundreds of agency and legislative sites. Exa Monitors API reruns your search on the schedule you choose and sends only new results to your webhook, so a compliance platform picks up each change without anyone checking those sites by hand.

Many teams still check agency press pages and trade publications by hand every week. Use Monitors API to set up a recurring search for the topics, agencies, and jurisdictions you track, such as enforcement actions in a particular industry or guidance on one statute. Each monitor reruns its search on the schedule you set and sends only new results to your webhook. Because the search runs on meaning, it also catches an enforcement action involving similar conduct even when the agency describes it in different words.

Westlaw and LexisNexis are research databases with editorial features such as headnotes and citators, built for lawyers to search on screen. Exa is a search API your product calls directly, reaching fresh and long-tail sources across the open web, including sites outside the US. Many legal AI teams use Exa alongside a licensed database.

Start with coverage. Check whether it includes the court opinions, statutes, agency guidance, and filings your users depend on, plus the live web for anything that came out this week. Then look at how results support citations, whether you can restrict sources by domain, and how the vendor handles your data. For research memos and other multi-step work that requires deep research, check whether the vendor offers an agent layer like the Exa Agent API in addition to single searches. Exa covers each of these, with SOC 2 Type II and zero data retention on enterprise plans.

Yes. Exa is SOC 2 Type II audited and honors GDPR and CCPA data-subject rights. Enterprise plans offer zero data retention, HIPAA with a BAA, SSO and SCIM, and a custom MSA and DPA. To access audit reports, request them in the Trust Center or talk to our team.