UpCounsel API
No API of any kind: no REST or GraphQL endpoints, developer portal, OAuth, SDKs, webhooks, or sandbox. UpCounsel publishes no integrations with legal practice-management or CRM platforms either, so jobs, invoices, and payments move by manual CSV export or hand entry.
Frequently asked questions
UpCounsel scores F on the API Report Card. No API of any kind: no REST or GraphQL endpoints, developer portal, OAuth, SDKs, webhooks, or sandbox. UpCounsel publishes no integrations with legal practice-management or CRM platforms either, so jobs, invoices, and payments move by manual CSV export or hand entry.
Without a usable official API, teams fall back on manual exports, file drops, or one-off vendor integrations. The other option is an unofficial API layer like Supergood that automates the authenticated web app directly.
UpCounsel is an online legal services marketplace founded in August 2012 by Matt Faustman (CEO, ex-Latham & Watkins associate) and Mason Blake (CTO) in San Francisco, California, that connects small and medium-sized businesses, startups, growth-stage companies, and the occasional individual with a curated, vetted network of 10,000+ independent U.S.-barred business attorneys for project-based, hourly, and retainer-style legal engagements.
Vertical: Legal, specifically online legal-services marketplace and pay-per-membership lead generation plus integrated escrow/billing for solo and small-firm U.S. business attorneys. A startup founder Googles 'startup lawyer San Francisco' or 'SaaS terms of service attorney', lands on an UpCounsel SEO landing page (one of thousands in the practice-area + legal-definitions corpus), clicks 'Post a Job', and completes a free intake form (project scope, budget guidance, jurisdiction, urgency)..
Moderate brand recognition inside the SMB/startup community, low absolute market share, near-zero developer/API ubiquity.
Client / company records: company name, contact person, contact info, jurisdiction(s) of operation, industry, headcount tier, stage (pre-seed/seed/Series A/etc.), billing address, payment method tokens (card on file), evergreen-retainer balance, lifetime spend, lifetime matter count..
UpCounsel is a second-generation Web 2.0 legal marketplace, incorporated in August 2012 out of the AngelPad incubator, raised ~$13.9M across three rounds (Homebrew $1.5M seed 2013, Metamorphic/Crosslink $2.4M seed 2014, Menlo Ventures $10M Series A 2015), grew to 25,000+ attorneys and 18,000+ companies by 2019, came within days of shutdown in February 2020 (after a contemplated LinkedIn data-transfer deal and an ~88% shareholder approval to close), and was acquired by Enduring Ventures on March 31, 2020, with Xavier Helgesen as acting CEO and Sieva Kozinsky as CFO.
No public REST or GraphQL API is offered for jobs, proposals, attorney profiles, matches, messages, documents, time entries, invoices, payments or reviews; third parties cannot query UpCounsel programmatically. No developer portal, OpenAPI/Swagger spec, SDKs (JS, Python, Ruby, .NET, Go), sandbox or API key issuance exists for UpCounsel. Full sourced list under Sources below.
Common alternatives include LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer, Priori Legal, Axiom (Axiom Global), LawTrades, Lawdingo. Graded alternatives appear under "More from the report card" below.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.