NewsLII News | October 20, 2026
Engineering & Website Upgrades
Following last year’s major content management system migration, the engineering team spent considerable effort in FY26 on the security-driven upgrades that keep a public resource of this scale trustworthy.
That included work supporting the aforementioned Introduction to Basic Legal Citation and a major software migration underpinning our maintenance of the Code of Federal Regulations, as well as much of our legacy software — unglamorous projects whose success is measured by the fact that no one outside the team noticed them happening.
The team also built a bulk data endpoint, initially to serve a licensing arrangement, which now stands ready to deliver all of our major collections to partners who need them at scale. Standing up the service in record time, LII Developer Vivek Kumar and DevOps Engineer Eric Gullufsen teamed up to deliver a highly optimized feature set, enabling ready retrieval of standardized updating metadata alongside bulk delivery of LII content. It is built to extend in the future to support alternate content formats. So far, the endpoint has also streamlined ad hoc reuse of our data by informal collaborators, students working on applied research projects, and also our core staff.
The most exciting public-facing project for the engineering team this year has been the deeply collaborative process of bringing search features explored in last summer’s Legal Innovation Fellowship project and M.Eng. projects to a production environment, without interruption of the existing service. Eric installed and load tested a new, highly scalable vector database. Vivek implemented a hybrid search which integrated its results with those produced by our existing search platform. LII’s Language & Data Scientist Dr. Sylvia Kwakye and law-trained engineer Matt Carey integrated findings from their applied research projects with the M.Eng. students (more on that below), focusing on configuration, classification, routing, and evaluation. Features from this project have been released behind the scenes, incrementally improving results while keeping the user experience consistent. Our next major release is planned for the fall.