Bloomberg Law API: What Exists, Who Can Use It, What to Ask

Short answer: Yes, Bloomberg Law has an API, but it covers court dockets and it is sold by arrangement, not downloaded from a public developer site. Bloomberg Law's own page describes an "Enterprise Dockets API Solution" with two parts: a search API and a feed of docket alerts. Since August 2026 it also has a connector that lets Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, search and track dockets for Bloomberg Law subscribers. The prices, the technical documentation and the contract terms for the API are not published. Everything below comes from Bloomberg's own pages and from neutral press, read in early October 2026.

TL;DR

• The API exists and it is about dockets. A docket is the running list of filings in a court case. Bloomberg's page offers a search API and a feed of alerts.
• Access starts with a sales request. The page has a "Request a Demo" form. No sign-up page, key or price is shown.
• The Claude connector works for subscribers only. Bloomberg says your subscription must have connector access switched on.
• Searching "Bloomberg API" can lead somewhere else. Bloomberg's developer portal and its Data License are for financial data from the Bloomberg Terminal side of the company.
• Statutes and regulations are not described. None of the API or connector pages read mentions fetching statute text. Bloomberg says case law research happens in its own research tools.

Terms used here

An API (application programming interface) is a way for one program to ask another for data and get a structured reply. A docket is the court's log of everything filed in a case. An MCP connector is a link that lets an AI assistant such as Claude call another company's service as a tool. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. A feed is data pushed to you on a schedule instead of fetched on request. Secure FTP is a safe way of dropping files on a server for you to collect. JSON is a plain text format that programs read easily.

Several companies share the Bloomberg name

This is where most searches go wrong. People type "Bloomberg API" and "Bloomberg developer" into a search box and expect one answer. There are at least three different things.

Bloomberg Law is the legal research service. It belongs to Bloomberg Industry Group, which describes itself as an affiliate of Bloomberg L.P. Bloomberg's June 2026 announcement of its Regology purchase names Bloomberg Tax and Bloomberg Government next to Bloomberg Law as sister sources of data and news.

The Bloomberg developer portal is something else. Its front page says "Sign in to access developer resources and technical documentation for Bloomberg APIs". It then lists documentation, an API reference and best practices. The Bloomberg Terminal is the company's financial data screen, and its developer tools sit on that side of the business. What the portal contains is not public.

Data License is Bloomberg's service for selling financial data to companies. Its own page lists reference, pricing, risk, regulation, fundamentals and historical data, and says it can be reached by REST API, SFTP and cloud delivery. On September 29, 2026, Bloomberg announced an Enterprise MCP for its newer Data License Plus. The release says it covers "pricing and reference data across asset classes, company fundamentals and structure, economics and alternative data". It does not mention court dockets, case law or statutes.

So if your product needs legal data, the Bloomberg Law pages are the ones to read. The Terminal developer portal and Data License are worth checking only if you also need market data.

A short history of Bloomberg Law

The product is younger than Westlaw and Lexis.

In October 2009 JD Journal wrote that Bloomberg had been working on a database to rival Westlaw and Lexis "for at least two years". Robert Ambrogi of LawSites later wrote that it "officially launched in December 2009". He gave it credit for "getting into the game with swagger" and called it a "work in progress", like a luxury yacht only partly built.

Two years later came a bigger step. In August 2011 Bloomberg announced it would buy BNA, the Bureau of National Affairs, a publisher of labor, tax and regulatory reports and treatises. By April 2012, as Ambrogi reported, every Bloomberg Law subscriber had full access to BNA content. He noted that Bloomberg Law "is a flat-rate, all-access platform", so the BNA material came at no extra fee. That flat-rate habit still shows in Bloomberg's marketing of its docket product, which promises "one predictable price".

The workflow side grew later. Bloomberg Industry Group bought Dashboard Legal, a legal project management tool, on April 9, 2024. It bought Regology, an AI regulatory intelligence platform, on June 3, 2026. Legal IT Insider reports that Bloomberg Law publicly launched its AI Assistant and Bloomberg Law Answers in January 2025.

The docket data has its own timeline. A January 2024 Bloomberg release says the product added over 320 state-level courts in 2023. An August 2025 release adds courts in Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas and Vermont. Dockets are also where Bloomberg Law publishes its API page, so this guide spends most of its time there.

The Enterprise Dockets API

The Enterprise Dockets API Solution page is the main developer-facing page Bloomberg Law publishes. The link here is a Bloomberg-hosted copy of the page, which also appears on pro.bloomberglaw.com. It says Bloomberg Law's "market-leading coverage of over 200 million federal and state court dockets" is "packaged in an enterprise delivery option that includes exclusive features". It describes two integrations.

Alerts integration. The page says "Enterprise dockets search function provides docket alerts in a JSON format delivered to a secure FTP site at regular intervals". You set up alerts on Bloomberg Law with your own parameters, pick delivery "by feed", and then process the files with your own applications.

Search integration. The page says "Docket Search API is a RESTful API which allows programmatic searching across various fields in our dockets and returns results in JSON format". REST is a common style of web API. You query it from your own app or script and get back specific data fields.

The page also promises "unlimited search and alerts". It lists analytics by company, firm, court and judge. It adds "API-exclusive custom analytics and dashboards" and "more alert capacity and custom scripts with an API solution". Bloomberg's regular dockets page adds that coverage includes "complete federal coverage and more than 1,000 state courts with additional courts added each month". It also says you can "connect our dockets solution with your other internal applications".

The enterprise page ends with a comparison table of the web product and the integrated option. The table is an embedded graphic, so its contents are not in the page text, and this guide does not rely on it.

The Claude connector

On August 20, 2026, Bloomberg Law announced a new AI experience for the ILTACON legal technology conference. The release says Bloomberg Law would preview new "interoperability capabilities" to bring its "litigation intelligence and dockets data into AI tools and workflows legal organizations use outside the platform". Then it says: "Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Bloomberg Law now offers an integration with Anthropic's Claude."

Bloomberg's support page for the connector describes it in detail. Claude's own connector directory lists the same 17 tools. In plain terms, a subscriber can ask Claude to:

• search dockets across courts, parties, filing types and keywords
• look up a docket by number, party or case name
• pull docket details, entries, timelines and complaint summaries "where available"
• download specific filings as PDFs
• set up alerts and tracks, and request updates to tracked dockets
• get outcome predictions for eligible federal civil cases

Two details matter to a builder. Some actions are previewed first. These are creating alerts or tracks, requesting filings and updating dockets. The page says the preview includes "eligibility and any applicable cost", and you must confirm before the action runs. One of the tools previews a request to collect a filing from PACER, the federal court system's records service, that Bloomberg does not already hold. The page does not list any amounts. Second, the results tool can return up to 1,000 docket rows as a CSV file for charting.

Bloomberg also says what the connector leaves out. For case law or other non-docket research, judge analytics and litigation analytics, the page says to use Bloomberg Law's own products. It adds that if Claude summarizes a filing you upload, "that summary is generated by Claude, not Bloomberg Law".

The pages read describe a Claude connector only. They do not mention connectors for other AI assistants.

Who can use it and how access is granted

Both offerings run through a Bloomberg Law relationship.

For the Claude connector, the page is plain: "You need an active Bloomberg Law subscription with MCP connector access enabled." Unsure? Ask your Bloomberg Law administrator or account representative. You then add Bloomberg Law in Claude's connector settings and sign in with your Bloomberg Law account. It adds that "Users can only access the Bloomberg Law content that is available through their subscription."

For the Enterprise Dockets API, there is no sign-up path on the page. A "Request a Demo" form asks for your job title, company, organization type (law firm, corporation, government and others) and number of practitioners. It says a representative will contact you.

Bloomberg does not describe the steps that follow. Those are the contract, the technical onboarding and the credentials. If you need to plan a project, plan around a sales conversation first.

What the terms say

Bloomberg Industry Group's "Terms of Service: Subscription Products", published on bloombergindustry.com and updated November 2025, set the baseline. These are standard terms for licensed content, and three points matter to anyone building on an API or connector.

First, the terms define a user as "an individual user (human)" and say product access "is not permitted, for robots, bots and/or any other similar automated machine/device". Second, they bar scraping or storing content except with Bloomberg's prior written consent. Third, they say content may not be used "in prompts or for purposes of training, tuning, or otherwise incorporating in, any Language Model" without Bloomberg's written consent. Consent "may be withheld" and "may require Customer to enter into a separate license agreement".

The same terms say they apply except where "expressly permitted in the TOS, or the applicable Bloomberg Industry Group Service Agreement". Service agreements are private contracts, so they are not published. The connector page adds that connector data "is proprietary and subject to licensing restrictions", and asks users not to redistribute responses "in ways that violate your Bloomberg Law terms".

What does this mean in practice? The general terms are the starting point, and the paper that governs your feed or connector use is the one you sign. Get its wording on storage, on AI use, and on what your own customers may see. That is a question for Bloomberg in writing, and the web pages cannot answer it.

In their words

Legal IT Insider interviewed Kara DelVecchio, chief revenue officer of Bloomberg Industry Group, on September 9, 2026. She described who asks for these connections. Some firms have built their own AI systems, she said, and "want the trusted data source to integrate with the LLM that they've built". An LLM is a large language model, the kind of AI behind chat assistants.

She also said the dockets API already has users. In her words: "A lot of our customers already use things like our dockets API or our news API, where they're taking some of that information and feeding it into the workflows of the firm already." She called the connector "an extension of that".

That second quote is useful. It says Bloomberg Law has a news API as well as the dockets API. No page read describes the news API, so this guide cannot tell you what it contains or how to get it. Ask about it if news data matters to you.

The article's author, Caroline Hill, sees a sign that firms may want the data "without the UI". That is the interface legal publishers have progressively had to let go of. Her closing point is that "the reliable data and context layer is proving more defensible than the interface".

The comparison in one table

What is not published

Putting the pages together, here is what a buyer cannot find on them:

• a price for the dockets API, the news API, or the connector actions that carry a cost
• technical documentation for the Docket Search API, such as endpoints, fields, limits and how sign-in works
• how often the alert feed is delivered ("regular intervals" is the only wording)
• which courts the feed covers, as a list, and how far back the data goes
• a service-level agreement, meaning a written uptime promise
• the terms for storing docket data in your own system, or showing it to your own customers
• any description of the news API
• any statement about fetching statutes or regulations by citation

None of this is a criticism. Many enterprise data products are sold this way. It does mean a first call should be about contracts and documents before it is about features.

What to ask

These questions work with Bloomberg Law and with any vendor that says "we have an API". Our ten questions to ask a legal data vendor covers the wider checklist.

1. Can you send the technical documentation for the Docket Search API and the alert feed before we sign?
2. Which courts does the feed cover today, and where can I see the list and the start dates?
3. How fast does a new filing reach the feed after the court posts it?
4. What is included in the base price, and which actions carry a separate cost (filing requests, docket updates)?
5. May I store docket data in my own database, and for how long?
6. May my own clients or users see the data, or is it for internal use only?
7. What do the terms say about AI tools, including prompts and models I might connect?
8. Does the connector use the same contract as the API, and who in my company can switch it on?
9. What does the news API contain, and is it part of the same agreement?
10. What happens to my integration if a field or format changes?

If the need is the law itself

The Bloomberg Law pages read describe docket search and alerts. For other research, the connector page sends you to Bloomberg Law's own tools. Does your product need statutes, regulations and court rules as text you can retrieve by citation? Then ask any vendor what comes back and what you may store. Vaquill AI is built as a US primary law API for that kind of retrieval, and the US primary law API page shows its coverage. For the bigger picture, see our complete guide to US law data, and our guide to court records APIs and court data APIs.

Where to read next

The same question for other vendors is answered in the Westlaw API guide, the LexisNexis developer portal guide and the Harvey and Legora guide.

FAQ

Does Bloomberg Law have an API?

Yes, for court dockets. Bloomberg Law's Enterprise Dockets API Solution page describes a search API that returns JSON and an alert feed delivered by secure file transfer. It is sold on request. The page shows no price and no technical documentation.

Is there a public Bloomberg Law developer portal?

None was found among Bloomberg's pages. The Bloomberg developer portal at developer.bloomberg.com asks you to sign in, and it belongs to Bloomberg's financial data business. For Bloomberg Law's docket API, the page sends you to a demo request.

Does Bloomberg Law work with Claude?

Yes. In August 2026 Bloomberg Law announced a connector for Claude, based on MCP. Subscribers whose accounts have connector access can search dockets, pull filings, set alerts and track cases from a Claude conversation. Bloomberg's support page lists 17 tools.

Can I use the Bloomberg Law connector without a subscription?

No. Bloomberg says you need an active Bloomberg Law subscription with connector access enabled on your account. You sign in with your Bloomberg Law credentials, and you can reach only the content your subscription includes.

How much does the Bloomberg Law API cost?

Bloomberg does not publish a price for the dockets API. Its web docket product is described as having "one predictable price", but that is for the web product. Some connector actions show a cost before you confirm, and the amounts are not listed. Ask for a written quote.

Does Bloomberg Law have a news API?

An executive said so in a September 2026 interview, naming "our dockets API or our news API". No page read describes it. Ask Bloomberg Law what it covers and whether it comes under the same agreement.

Can I get statutes or case law from Bloomberg Law through an API?

The pages read do not describe it. The Enterprise Dockets API is about dockets, and the connector page sends case law and other research to Bloomberg Law's own tools. If you need statute text by citation, ask any vendor exactly what comes back and what you may store.

Where do I start if I need US legal data in my own product?

Start with the checklist above and the ten questions to ask a legal data vendor. Then compare sources built to return law as data. A US primary law API is one place to begin.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill AI: the pipelines that pull statutes, regulations and court rules from every US jurisdiction's official publisher, and the REST API, MCP server and open dataset that serve them.