How to query legal notices in a stock news API
Pull shareholder class-action and investor-alert notices with type=legal, or leave them out of a headline feed.
Legal notices on MarketNewsAPI are shareholder class-action and investor-alert notices. They are not SEC filings, and the company is not affiliated with the SEC. Query them with type=legal. Leave them out of a normal headline feed with type=news,press_release.
What arrives in the payload
A legal notice includes the headline, a snippet, a short summary, tickers, the source, timestamps, and a link to the original. It does not include the law firm's full text. Press releases are the type that includes full wire text. If your UI renders a notice, show the source and the link. The terms require that, and they do not allow you to present the notice as your own reporting.
REST
The API includes legal notices unless you filter them out. The site's own homepage feed hides them until you turn the type on. Your app should be explicit either way.
curl "https://api.marketnewsapi.com/v1/news?tickers=AAPL&type=legal&limit=20" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $MARKETNEWSAPI_KEY"To keep a product feed to publisher stories and wires, send type=news,press_release. type=stock_news is the alias for publisher stock news only.
WebSocket
On Pro, subscribe to type:legal if a person or an agent should see notices as they are ingested. Channels are OR. A connection subscribed to ticker:AAPL and type:legal receives Apple articles and every legal notice. If you want Apple notices only, subscribe to the ticker and drop messages whose type is not legal in the client.
Free cannot open the socket. Pro is $15 a month, or $162 a year. The 7-day trial includes the live feed and the full archive, and a card is required. Free stays at 100 requests a day, delayed 15 minutes, with the last year of history.
Try it for 7 days. Signup starts Pro. A card is required. Real-time REST, WebSocket, and MCP, with no request cap. After that it's $15/month, or Free if you stop.
Do not label them as filings
Where a notice belongs in the product
A headline feed for a broker or a research app usually wants publisher stories and press releases. Notices are a different tone: a law firm describing a case, not a company describing earnings. Put them on their own tab, or behind a filter that defaults off, the way the MarketNewsAPI homepage leaves legal off until it is turned on. The API default is the opposite. If you forget the filter, notices sit in the same list as earnings releases.
Search still works. q matches text, and tickers still ANDs with type=legal. A page of Apple notices is tickers=AAPL&type=legal. A page of notices that mention a phrase uses q plus type=legal. Do not scrape the law firm's page to get a longer body. You are licensed for the headline, snippet, summary, and link.
Tell an agent what it is holding
If an assistant can call this endpoint, put the type in the tool result and add one line to the prompt: a legal item is a class-action or investor-alert notice, not a filing and not a company statement. Ask the model to quote the summary and link the source, and to refuse a question that needs the docket or the full complaint. The summary is one to three sentences. It will not contain the procedural history.
Free can read notices, with the 15-minute delay and the last year of history. A monitoring product that must see a notice the hour it is published needs Pro. Pro is $15 a month, or $162 a year. The 7-day trial includes the live feed and the full archive, and a card is required. Free stays at 100 requests a day, delayed 15 minutes, with the last year of history. The wording on the terms is the one to follow. The filter list is on GET /news.