api.lawyer

Agents can’t practice law. They can call it.

The endpoint your agent hits the moment work turns legal — no SDK ceremony, no sales call, no law degree. Everything the law leaves open runs agent-native; the one act that needs a license is signed by an independent, verified professional.

Get your API keyRead the docs npx api.lawyer
standing terms
  1. No filing, no charge. Billing releases only on the government-issued receipt.
  2. Flat, posted pricing. Nothing hourly, nothing percentage-based; your spend ceiling is hard and you set it.
  3. Every reserved act is signed by an independent credential-holder, verified at call time, under their own license.
api.lawyer is infrastructure, not a law firm.
read · gate: none · no key required200 OK
$ curl api.lawyer/.well-known/agents.json

{
  "name": "api.lawyer",
  "interfaces": {
    "http": [{ "method": "GET", "url": "…/matters" }],
    "mcp": { "command": "npx api.lawyer mcp serve" }
  }
}
$400/hr

the meter your product can’t build against — any legal work, the law-firm way

UPL

the risk if your agent signs it anyway — a bar complaint, not a bug ticket

$0

what you pay when the act doesn’t complete — the meter releases only on the receipt

Incumbent figures are typical market rates for outside counsel. Targets, not live-service claims.

The line is where the law draws it.

Every capability is classified by its effect and gated exactly where the law gates it. Access is a function of authority, never a sales tier.

dataeffect: read

Dockets, registers, statutes, file-wrappers, chain-of-title. Reading a fact is never reserved, no matter how much AI does it — so reads are keyless from your very first call.

gate: none
serviceseffect: record

Drafting, assembly, analysis, monitoring. Agent-native end to end — assembly stays on the right side of unauthorized-practice rules because it selects mechanically and never tells your user what’s right for their matter.

scoped grants
commerceeffect: act

Money moves or an instrument executes. Some acts are unreserved (a fee payment, a provisional filing). Some are reserved — and there, an independent credential-holder signs under their own license.

Mandate + requiresSigner

An independent credential-holder reviews and, in their own judgment, signs under their own license.

requiresAccess
A restricted upstream — PACER, FinCEN BOI, private PAIR — your caller may only consume with a live credential.
requiresSigner
A reserved act only a live credential-holder may perform. Both gates are checked fresh at call time against the authoritative registry.

Every kind of legal work, one typed catalog.

One substrate for every practice area. The gate column tells your code which acts need a licensed human, before you call.

data — readgate: none · keyless
GET/patent/search?q=prior-art & citation hitsgate: none
GET/patent/{number}/statusprosecution history / file-wrappergate: none
GET/trademark/{serial}/statusTSDR status + prosecution eventsgate: none
GET/entity/{state}/{id}/standingSoS good standing + registered agentgate: none
GET/lien/ucc/{state}/{filing}UCC-1 status & lapse windowgate: none
GET/court/{district}/{case}/docketfederal docket & filingsrequiresAccess: pacer
services — recordagent-native
POST/patent/draft-claimsadversarial §101/102/103/112 examiner panelgate: none
POST/trademark/oa-response-draftoffice-action response draftgate: none
POST/contract/reviewclause-by-clause risk reportgate: none
POST/demand-letter/draftdrafted for attorney reviewgate: none
POST/entity/de/formation-docscertificate + consents + bylaws assemblygate: none
POST/docket-watchdeadline ladder on any asset — patent, mark, entity, caserequiresAccess: patent-center-practitioner
commerce — actmoney moves · instrument executes
POST/entity/de/formfiles the certificate — open actgate: none
POST/patent/file-provisionalpro-se-fileablegate: none
POST/patent/file-utilitythe reserved actrequiresSigner: uspto-registration
POST/trademark/file-oa-responsereserved — attorney signsrequiresSigner: state-bar
POST/demand-letter/sendreserved — attorney signs & sendsrequiresSigner: state-bar
POST/contract/adviselegal advice — reserved at the utterancerequiresSigner: state-bar

The pattern holds across every practice area: reading facts is never reserved, drafting is agent-native (an inventor may even file pro se), and the reserved acts — a filing signature, a demand letter on attorney letterhead, legal advice itself — route to an independent credential-holder. Your agent runs 90–98% of the graph; a licensed human performs the irreducible rest.

Patent, trademark OA, contract review, demand letters, and DE formation run today; litigation, tax, and immigration clone the shape.
Browse the catalog746 capabilities

You never cross the line.

The acts your agent cannot perform are not a model-quality problem. They are reserved to licensed humans by definition. This API makes that boundary callable.

  1. 01Call the API.

    curl your first read keyless — dockets, registers, good standing, file-wrappers — then let your agent run the open workflow: drafting, review, assembly, docketing.

  2. 02Hit the reserved act — and keep going.

    The call returns a typed PENDING_SIGNER state instead of a dead end, while an independent, verified professional reviews and — in their own judgment — signs and files under their own license. Credentials are checked fresh at the call against the authoritative registry: suspended means BLOCKED, never degraded.

  3. 03Get the receipt.

    The signed artifact, a verifiable Attestation, and the government receipt come back on a webhook. Your product moves on. You were never the lawyer — and never needed to be.

the machine’s response202 ACCEPTED
// POST /patent/file-utility
{
  "status": "PENDING_SIGNER",
  "effect": "act",
  "gate": { "requiresSigner": "uspto-registration" },
  "signer": {
    "routed": true,
    "verification": {
      "mode": "registry:USPTO-OED",
      "liveness": "FRESH"
    }
  },
  "eta": "PT24H",
  "then": {
    "attestation": "att_…",
    "receipt": "USPTO e-filing acknowledgment",
    "webhook": "outcome.filed"
  }
}
the signed instrument
authorityPatentAttorney
credentialuspto-registration, verified against the USPTO OED register at call time
livenessFRESH · suspended means BLOCKED, never degraded
feeThe professional’s flat Legal Fee, fixed at post time, entirely their own
signature of registered practitionertheir license, their judgment
The USPTO e-filing acknowledgment returns on webhook outcome.filed. Billing releases on the receipt.
No filing, no chargeFlat, posted pricingA live credential at every reserved actIndependent judgment, structurally protected

The people who sign come through gigs.lawyer — independent attorneys and USPTO patent agents on the network, claiming work under their own license, with coverage in force on every act. Their flat Legal Fee is entirely their own, fixed when the work is posted. That independence is your regulatory safety, not our fine print.

Priced like infrastructure, not like a law firm.

data
Keyless first value. Free tier, then metered with a hard spend ceiling you set. Deep commercial corpora sit behind the paid meter.
services
Metered per run. Drafting is compute, priced like compute — a contract risk report or an office-action response draft meters like the LLM call it is. Provisional patent draft: free; government fees pass through at cost; a done-for-you provisional filing lands the same afternoon for $199 flat.
commerce (reserved)
Flat per act, fixed before you call — floored by the professional’s flat Legal Fee, not partner rates. A demand letter goes out over an independent attorney’s signature for a flat two-figure fee; a utility filing resolves to a USPTO receipt on a webhook for a few hundred dollars against the $8–15k, three-week incumbent path — and it ratchets down with volume.

Exact rates are published with your key. Ceilings are hard: your agent can never spend past what you set — and if no filing issues, nothing is charged.

Three motions. One API.

Who consumes is a per-matter setting, not a different product. Same surface, same typed gate.

B2A

Business → Agent. Your agent is the customer.

No human in your loop at all. Your agent holds the key and a hard spend ceiling and buys legal work at machine speed — good-standing sweeps across every entity you touch, deadline watches on the whole portfolio, contract triage on every inbound MSA, filings staged the moment a threshold trips. Everything the law leaves open, end to end.

B2H2A

Business → Human → Agent. Your users, with a licensed human at the one moment that needs one.

Your product serves people — founders, sellers, landlords, HR teams. Your agent does the work in-product; when a user’s matter hits a reserved act, it routes to an independent credential-holder on the network who reviews, and in their own judgment signs. Typed PENDING_SIGNER states mean your UI shows honest progress, never a dead end.

B2A2D

Business → Agent → Downstream. Your platform’s agents, serving their customers.

You run agents on behalf of downstream clients — a legal-features SDK inside your SaaS, a marketplace’s compliance bot, an enterprise deploying fleets. Each downstream client’s matter carries its own journaled consent, its own conflicts surface, its own receipts. The gate travels with the capability: you never build a professional network, and you never practice law.

Whoever’s calling, the constitution is identical: open work runs agent-native, reserved acts route to an independent licensed human, and every outcome lands as a typed webhook with the receipt attached.

api key request

Get your API key.

One key covers the whole surface. Reads stay keyless, and nothing is priced by the hour or as a share of an outcome.

Read the docs

Credentialed professional? You’re the supply side gigs.lawyer

Keys are provisioned by email, patent surface first. Prefer the terminal? npx api.lawyer requests your key, stores it, and manages B2H2A delegated-authority tokens. Nothing on this page is a live-service claim, and nothing on it is legal advice.