Pro Tier Module

Legal Research

Search authoritative U.S. government sources in one place - keyless where possible, no paid corpora.

This tool runs inside GDBS Pro. What it computes and the authorities it applies are below.

The problem

Authoritative legal research is scattered across Federal Register, eCFR, EDGAR, the U.S. Code, and USPTO, and the commercial gateways charge per-seat fees and answer with opaque ranking.

The local-first solution

A unified, deterministic search companion queries published government sources through the GDBS server proxy and renders the normalized hits with their official link, surfacing exactly what the source returned with no AI ranking or summarizing.

What it does

Keyless sources: Federal Register, eCFR, SEC EDGAR search/company/XBRL, U.S. Code resolver, federal bills

Central-keyed free sources: USPTO patents, Congress.gov bills, Regulations.gov comments (our server-side key)

Normalized hits with title, citation/identifier, date, agency/company, and official link

Bindable as the target of the Legal Matter Intake workflow automation

Practice-area packs as quick-pick presets, not curated datasets

No paid or commercial data - no Westlaw or Lexis

Honest scope

A search and retrieval companion over published sources; not legal advice and it does not rank or summarize (no AI). There is no case-law corpus - no judicial opinions or docket analytics. USPTO trademark full-text search is not offered, and central-keyed sources report 'not configured' honestly until our free key is set server-side.

Authorities cited

Federal Register API (federalregister.gov/developers/api/v1). Public, keyless. Daily journal of the U.S. government - proposed/final rules and notices.
Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR) search API (ecfr.gov/developers/documentation/api/v1). Public, keyless. Current codified federal regulations.
SEC EDGAR full-text search (efts.sec.gov/LATEST/search-index). Public, keyless; requires only a descriptive User-Agent (an identifier, not a credential) which the server attaches.
SEC EDGAR company submissions (data.sec.gov/submissions/CIK##########.json). Public, keyless; same identifying User-Agent. Recent filings for one CIK.
SEC EDGAR XBRL company facts (data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyfacts/CIK##########.json). Public, keyless; same identifying User-Agent. Headline us-gaap financial facts (revenues, net income, assets, liabilities, equity), latest annual where present.
govinfo U.S. Code link service (govinfo.gov/link/uscode/{title}/{section}). Public, keyless. Constructed official deep-link; govinfo resolves it to the current published granule (full text lives at the link, not scraped).
govinfo BILLSTATUS bulk data (bulkdata.govinfo.gov / govinfo.gov/bulkdata/json/BILLSTATUS/{congress}). Public, keyless bulk index (the search API is keyed and excluded). Filters the per-Congress bulk entry NAMES; bill titles/actions live in each linked package.
USPTO Open Data Portal (developer.uspto.gov / data.uspto.gov). FREE API key (ours, server-side only; never sent to the client). Patent search. Trademark full-text search is not offered (no free keyed source).
Congress.gov API via api.data.gov (api.congress.gov/v3). FREE api.data.gov key (ours, server-side only). Bill search. Shared key is rate-limited (~5000/hr) so the server caches results.

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Related tools

Run the research

Search the government sources in your browser and route the cited hits into a Sandbox set or a Worklog case. You supply no key, and nothing is uploaded to a commercial cloud.

Try it live inside GDBS See Pro pricing

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