National Law Review Legal News Scraper

Scrape attorney-authored legal news and analysis articles from the National Law Review. Returns article title, author, law firm, publication date, practice areas, jurisdictions, summary, full text, and lead image URL for 33,000+ articles across every major US practice area.

---

Legal News Scraper Features

• Extracts 11 fields per article — title, author, firm, date, practice areas, jurisdictions, summary, full body text, image, source, and scrape timestamp
• Pulls from the full sitemap index — 33,000+ articles spanning a decade of legal commentary
• Sorts newest-first by lastmod, so maxItems: 100 returns the most recent 100 articles, not a random slice
• Accepts a direct URL list too, for targeted scrapes of specific articles
• No proxies, no browser, no CAPTCHA — just clean HTML from a server-rendered site
• Parses JSON-LD schema.org NewsArticle metadata, which is about as stable as web data gets

---

Who Uses National Law Review Data?

• Law firm marketing teams — Track which firms and attorneys publish on which practice areas, benchmark thought-leadership output
• Compliance and regulatory teams — Monitor new analysis on regulatory changes across jurisdictions you care about
• Legal tech startups — Build datasets of attorney-authored content for search, summarization, or LLM training
• Market intelligence analysts — Track sentiment, topic frequency, and firm activity across the legal industry
• Dataset builders — Collect a deep corpus of structured legal writing without scraping paywalled publications

---

How the Legal News Scraper Works

1. Walk the sitemap — Fetches the National Law Review sitemap index and each child sitemap, collecting article URLs with their last-modified timestamps
2. Sort and slice — Orders articles newest-first, then caps the list to maxItems
3. Fetch each article — CheerioCrawler pulls each page at moderate concurrency, respecting rate limits
4. Parse and save — Pulls JSON-LD metadata for the authoritative fields and CSS selectors for the body, practice areas, and jurisdictions

Skip steps 1 and 2 by passing a list of article URLs directly. The scraper handles that mode too, since sometimes you already know which articles you want.

---

Input

{
  "maxItems": 100,
  "sp_intended_usage": "Compliance monitoring across tax and employment practice areas",
  "sp_improvement_suggestions": "None"
}

Or target specific articles by URL:

{
  "articleUrls": [
    { "url": "https://natlawreview.com/article/major-h-1b-changes-announced-including-new-100000-fee" },
    { "url": "https://natlawreview.com/article/whats-domain-name-explainer-domain-investing" }
  ],
  "maxItems": 2,
  "sp_intended_usage": "Targeted research",
  "sp_improvement_suggestions": "None"
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum number of articles to scrape. Articles are sorted newest-first when walking the sitemap. Set to 0 for unlimited.
articleUrls	array	[]	Optional list of specific article URLs. When provided, the sitemap walk is skipped and only these URLs are crawled.
proxyConfiguration	object	none	Proxy settings. Not required — National Law Review is a public site with no anti-bot protection.

---

Legal News Scraper Output Fields

{
  "article_url": "https://natlawreview.com/article/major-h-1b-changes-announced-including-new-100000-fee",
  "title": "Major H-1B Changes Announced, Including New $100,000 Fee",
  "source_site": "natlawreview",
  "author_name": "Norris McLaughlin P.A.",
  "author_firm": "Norris McLaughlin  P.A.",
  "publication_date": "2025-09-22",
  "summary": "In a series of startling and conflicting announcements that caused a great deal of panic over the weekend for H-1B holders and their employers, President Trump ",
  "full_text": "In a series of startling and conflicting announcements ... particularly small business and nonprofits.",
  "practice_areas": [
    "Immigration",
    "Labor Employment",
    "Administrative Regulatory"
  ],
  "jurisdictions": [
    "All Federal"
  ],
  "image_url": "https://natlawreview.com/sites/default/files/2025-09/H1B%20Visa%20Lottery%20Employment%20Immigration_2.jpg",
  "scraped_at": "2026-04-18T01:19:26.230Z"
}

Field	Type	Description
article_url	string	Canonical article URL
title	string	Article headline
source_site	string	Source publication — currently always natlawreview
author_name	string	Attorney or author page name
author_firm	string	Law firm the author works for
publication_date	string	Publication date in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD)
summary	string	Short article summary from JSON-LD description
full_text	string	Full article body as plain text, HTML tags stripped and entities decoded
practice_areas	array	Practice areas tagged on the article (e.g. Construction Law, Real Estate)
jurisdictions	array	Jurisdictions tagged on the article (e.g. Florida, All Federal)
image_url	string	Lead image URL, if present
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of when the article was scraped

---

FAQ

How do I scrape the latest articles from the National Law Review?

Run the scraper with default input. It walks the sitemap, sorts by last-modified date, and returns the most recent 100 articles. Change maxItems to scrape more or fewer.

How do I scrape specific National Law Review articles by URL?

Pass a list of articleUrls in the input. The scraper skips the sitemap walk and fetches only the URLs you provide. Useful for re-scraping specific articles or building custom pipelines.

How much does the National Law Review Scraper cost to run?

The scraper uses the standard $0.10 per actor start + $0.001 per article record pricing. A 100-article run costs about $0.20 and finishes in under a minute. A full 33,000-article sitemap walk runs in under 10 minutes.

Does the scraper need proxies?

No. The National Law Review is a public Drupal site served through Varnish cache. No Cloudflare, no CAPTCHAs, no rate limiting in practice — the scraper ships with proxy settings disabled by default.

What practice areas does the National Law Review cover?

Every major US practice area, roughly. Construction law, immigration, tax, labor and employment, IP, real estate, financial services, environmental, health care, and dozens more. Each article is tagged with its practice areas and jurisdictions in the output.

---

Need More Features?

Need custom fields, filters, or coverage of additional legal news sites (JD Supra, Above the Law, Mondaq)? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use the Legal News Aggregator Scraper?

• First of its kind — No other Apify actor targets legal news and analysis. This is the only one.
• Clean structured output — JSON-LD-backed fields mean consistent author, firm, and date attribution across tens of thousands of articles, which saves you the cleanup pass you were going to run anyway
• Affordable — ~$0.001 per article, no proxy costs, no browser costs