Due Diligence
Due Diligence and Legal Research Automation
Automate the legal research layer of due diligence: find every relevant ruling, regulation, and enforcement action for any entity or legal issue.
Built by: M&A advisory platforms, litigation support tools, investigation firms, law firm research departments
The problem
Due diligence requires comprehensive coverage. When evaluating a target company, an acquisition, or a legal position, the research team needs to find every relevant court decision, regulatory action, and applicable regulation.
Missing a single enforcement decision or pending case can mean missed risk.
The work is exhaustive by nature: searching for entity names, related parties, relevant industries, applicable regulations, and specific legal issues across multiple jurisdictions. In practice, this means junior associates spending days on repetitive search-and-review cycles across fragmented databases.
How the API powers it
The Moonlit API turns due diligence research from a manual, multi-day process into a structured, automatable workflow.
Use keyword search for precise entity names, case numbers, and statutory references, with Boolean operators to build complex queries: "Acme Corp" AND ("competition law" OR "antitrust"). Use hybrid search for broader topic discovery: find all documents related to "platform liability for user-generated content" even when different jurisdictions use different terminology.
Enable facets to get an instant breakdown of results by jurisdiction, document type, field of law, and source, giving your team or users a structured overview: "the target appears in 8 competition cases, 3 data protection decisions, and 2 tax rulings across 4 jurisdictions."
The integration pattern
A due diligence automation tool built on Moonlit typically runs multiple queries in parallel: entity name searches, industry-specific regulatory searches, and jurisdiction-specific statutory searches. Aggregate the results using facets to build a risk profile.
Use the document retrieval endpoint to pull full texts and AI summaries for the most relevant findings. The sort_type parameter lets you surface the most recent documents (sort_type 1) for current risk assessment, or the most cited documents (sort_type 3) for identifying landmark decisions.
Date filters scope the research to the relevant time period. The reference search endpoint adds depth: once you identify a relevant regulation, trace every decision that cites it to understand the full enforcement landscape.
Key endpoints
Example request
curl -X POST "https://api.moonlit.ai/v1.1/search/keyword_search" \
-H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"query": "\"Platform Corp\" AND (\"competition law\" OR \"state aid\" OR \"merger control\")",
"jurisdictions": ["European Union", "Netherlands", "Germany"],
"sort_type": 1,
"num_results": 20,
"facets": true,
"all_facets": true
}'