Intelligence
Legal Analytics and Citation Intelligence
Analyze citation networks, identify landmark decisions, and track how case law evolves over time.
Built by: Legal publishers, litigation analytics companies, academic research tools, policy organizations
The problem
Understanding the legal landscape is not just about finding individual documents. It is about understanding relationships: which rulings cite which legislation, which CJEU decisions are most influential, how citation patterns shift over time, and which articles within a regulation attract the most judicial interpretation.
Traditional legal databases treat documents as isolated objects. They let you search for documents, but they do not help you understand the connections between them.
Building citation analytics from scratch requires extracting references from unstructured text, resolving them to document identifiers, and maintaining a graph of relationships. That is months of specialized engineering work.
How the API powers it
The Moonlit API provides citation intelligence as a first-class feature.
The reference search endpoint lets you query the citation network directly: given any document identifier, find all documents that cite it (direction 0), all documents it cites (direction 1), or both (direction 2). The articles endpoint breaks composite documents, such as the GDPR or a national civil code, into individual articles, each with a reference count showing how many documents cite that specific article.
Combine these: call the articles endpoint for the GDPR (identifier 32016R0679) to get every article with its citation count, then call reference search on the most-cited articles to find the case law interpreting them. The keyword search endpoint with sort_type 3 (most cited) surfaces landmark decisions in any field. Enable facets to see how citations distribute across jurisdictions, courts, and document types.
The integration pattern
Citation intelligence unlocks product features that go far beyond basic search.
Legal publishers can build interactive citation maps showing how a regulation is interpreted across jurisdictions. Litigation analytics platforms can identify the most influential precedents for a given legal argument. Academic tools can trace how legal doctrine evolves by tracking citation patterns over time. Policy researchers can measure the impact of EU directives by analyzing how many national court decisions cite them.
Every document in Moonlit's database includes a "referenced" field showing its total citation count, and the reference search endpoint supports all standard filters (jurisdiction, date, document type, source), so you can slice the citation network in any dimension.
Key endpoints
Example request
# Find all court decisions that cite the GDPR, sorted by most cited
curl -X POST "https://api.moonlit.ai/v1.1/search/reference_search" \
-H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"reference_identifier": "32016R0679",
"reference_direction": 0,
"sort_type": 3,
"num_results": 10,
"facets": true
}'