“Our users aren’t coming to browse; they come to find an exact answer fast, and SearchStax makes that possible.”
Sarah Bauer | Director, Electronic Publications at American Legal Publishing
As large language models and AI tools reshape how people and systems find information, few publishers have benefited like American Legal Publishing. While many branded websites have seen referral traffic drop, American Legal’s library of verified municipal codes has become a go-to data source for AI systems and retrieval engines seeking authoritative, factual content.
That shift has brought both opportunity and operational pressure. The organization now fields heavier crawler traffic, growing public use and increasing demands for uptime — all while maintaining the precision and integrity of the laws they publish.
To meet that demand, the team leaned on its modern search infrastructure to scale seamlessly. With a managed Solr service taking dev headaches off their hands, American Legal protects uptime, scales on demand, and delivers quick discovery for professionals and the public. The recent surge in AI-driven traffic has validated the architecture: search has stayed stable and the publishing team continues to deliver updates at pace.
In this case study, you’ll learn how American Legal Publishing:
American Legal’s code library spans everything from small villages to New York City’s 10,000 pages of law. Two audiences rely on this every day. Municipal staff use the site to verify, interpret and share accurate information. Residents and businesses use it to understand the rules that govern daily life.
For both groups, search is the front door. It has to be set up to handle legal terminology as comfortably as natural language, and it needs to return the right section, the right chapter and the right jurisdiction without delay.
“I’d estimate that 95% of the people that hit our site use the search bar to find what they need.”
– Sarah Bauer, Director, Electronic Publications
American Legal’s previous out-of-the-box platform couldn’t keep pace with user expectations. The American Legal team is required to retain precise legal search operators such as Boolean logic, wildcard and proximity search while modernizing the experience for non-experts.
At the same time, they had to accommodate heavy, image-rich zoning documents, index and serve PDFs, and keep page performance sharp. What’s more, publishing velocity was non-negotiable. Large cities push frequent changes, and the team couldn’t afford to reprocess entire states just to fix a line in a single code.
Uptime mattered just as much. “When you’re managing thousands of codes, uptime isn’t an option. We need to be up 24/7, and that’s why the Solr stability we gained with SearchStax is so crucial,” explained Bauer. “West Coast users arrive after Eastern working hours, and the site has to stay responsive without creating after-hours emergencies and troubleshooting.”
Working with development partner APAX Software, American Legal moved search to Solr and engaged SearchStax to manage reliability, scaling and performance. The result is a system that respects the precision of legal work and the speed expectations of the public.
Users can search a single code, a chapter, a topical slice like zoning or a curated set of jurisdictions. Plain-language queries sit beside more sophisticated search operators, which sets the site up to handle everything from natural language questions to more complex queries.
Long pages render quickly through lazy loading, and PDFs with heavy imagery remain discoverable without dragging performance. Most importantly, the publishing flow now targets the code that changed. For example, code changes for Cleveland can go live without waiting for all of Ohio.
“Before, a single change could take hours because we had to reprocess an entire state. Now, we just update the city that changed and SearchStax ensures those updates are searchable.”
– Sarah Bauer
Recently, American Legal has seen a sharp increase in crawler and AI-driven traffic that slowed unrelated tasks and made the site feel sluggish. “We started noticing an increase in web crawlers and AI-driven traffic hitting our site hard enough to slow things down,” described Bauer. “It was a live stress test. We added measures to filter out abusive activity, but the search layer never faltered.”
With SearchStax providing right-sized infrastructure and 3rd party firewalls filtering out abusive patterns, American Legal has proven that their stack can absorb unpredictable load without sacrificing search reliability or publishing pace.
Publishing remains fast and agile as the team doesn’t have to worry about the operational burden of managing their Solr infrastructure. Typical updates index and go live in minutes, while very large collections complete within hours. That speed helps editors respond to corrections and urgent updates without clogging the pipeline.
Uptime and stability mean fewer after-hours alerts from their clients. “I really prefer not having major clients calling me in the middle of the night. With the stability we have now, I don’t have to worry about that,” said Bauer. This improved reliability isn’t just a boon for their site’s functionality, it’s also a quality that reinforces brand trust and authority; clients know they can trust American Legal to make their codes available 24/7.
For public visitors, discovery is straightforward. A clerk can jump to the exact chapter needed. A resident can enter plain language and still land on the right ordinance. Everything remains open to the public with no paywalls. Municipalities work with American Legal Publishing to make the law accessible, and once content is online anyone can reach it; SearchStax helps them ensure that.
American Legal needed a search experience partner that treats uptime, elasticity and observability as table stakes.
SearchStax delivers operational agility to handle cluster health, scaling and maintenance so the team can focus on content, governance and service to municipalities. Precision features remain intact and the publishing engine moves as quickly as the law changes.
“Being in the middle of fast-moving laws has forced us to evolve; our systems move faster now. SearchStax supports that velocity by making our clients’ content searchable and always available to the public.”
– Sarah Bauer
New collections are already in scope, including projects measured in tens of thousands of documents. The recent surge showed the environment can scale, and the team expects continued growth in complex zoning-related legal documents and datasets, more frequent updates and rising AI-driven discovery.
SearchStax Managed Search gives them the confidence to keep the public record searchable and up to date, while having the bandwidth to focus on what’s next for their clients and end users.
“For many people, our service is how they interact with their local government. They expect to type in something and see results immediately. At the end of the day, we can count on SearchStax to keep our website search up and running, no matter the load or scale of our content updates.”
– Sarah Bauer
Managed Search
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North America
Publication
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