When law firm professionals hear the acronym “API,” they might think of an overly technical, hard-to-understand piece of software—something for a firm’s engineers to handle instead. But as Big Law librarians who have experimented with application programming interface connectors, or APIs, could tell you, their use in the modern-day firm isn’t just for technologists. And furthermore, their implementation takes a whole host of soft skills.

A Sunday session at the 2022 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) conference titled “The Law Library’s Role in Data Integration, APIs, and Attorney Workflow Initiatives” dove into how APIs are being used practically in today’s firms. The panelists, comprised of representatives from Big Law firms, revealed a host of use cases for developing APIs to connect a firm’s repository of data to outside applications—from dashboards visualizing what type of legal research is being done to automatic workflows that generate emails following trigger actions to developing time-and-billing visualizations to a firm’s business development team.