Legal and regulatory intelligence for public affairs: how communications teams use Vizlegal
How PR and public affairs teams use Vizlegal to track court filings, regulatory decisions, and planning files across official Irish sources before a story breaks.
How communications consultancies and public affairs teams track court filings, regulatory decisions, and planning files across more than 30 official sources, and check a claim against the record before advising a client to respond.
The matter a client faces rarely arrives first as a call from a journalist. It starts in a courtroom, a regulator's decision, or a planning file, often days earlier. Proceedings issue in the Central Office. A decision lands from the Data Protection Commission. An enforcement notice is served. By the time the account team hears about it, the story has moved and the statement is being written in a scramble.
Vizlegal was built to close that gap. The platform structures more than 5 million documents from 38 official sources, courts, tribunals, regulators, planning authorities, and gazettes across Ireland, the UK, and Europe, in one searchable app on mobile, tablet, and desktop. More than 3,000 users work in it, including practitioners, in-house counsel, and newsrooms.
This article and brochure sets out four ways it earns its place in a communications or public affairs team's week.
Know that proceedings have issued before the press does
Court offices and registries notify nobody. A consultancy that wants to know when a client, a competitor, or a Minister appears in a filing has to check each source by hand, every day, and hope nothing lands while the team is in a meeting.
On Vizlegal, an alert can be set on a name, an entity, or a keyword across every source on the platform. When a defamation action, a judicial review, an injunction, or a regulatory enforcement notice is lodged, an email arrives, with delivery into Slack and Teams for teams that work there. The daily trawl is handled, and the account lead decides what is material.
The practical difference is that a holding statement gets drafted before the first call from a reporter rather than during it.
Follow a matter from the first decision to the court challenge
A regulatory or policy question rarely sits in one place. A Data Protection Commission decision can end in a High Court challenge. A planning file starts with a local authority, moves to An Coimisiún Pleanála, and may finish in judicial review. Each stage sits in a separate system, and nobody publishes the chain as a chain.
Vizlegal covers decisions from the Data Protection Commission and the Office of the Information Commissioner, WRC and Labour Court adjudications, Tax Appeals determinations, judicial reviews, and planning applications across all 31 local authorities alongside An Coimisiún Pleanála cases. Case Timelines put a matter's full history on one screen, from originating record through appeal.
An account team can see where a file has actually got to before advising on it, rather than reconstructing the sequence from press coverage.
Build the full picture on any name
Before a pitch, a new mandate, or a crisis response, someone has to establish what is already on the record about a company and its directors. Done by hand, that means the High Court search office, the WRC, the Tax Appeals Commission, planning registers, Iris Oifigiúil, and the trademarks register, each searched separately.
One query on Vizlegal runs across all of them at once: every filing, every tribunal mention, every planning interest, and every prior judgment, returned together. Legacy archives are included, so the search reaches back years rather than weeks. Law firm and judge analytics show the litigation footprint of a company or a counterpart when scoping a campaign or a mandate.
Check a claim against the originating document
Being fast only helps if the advice is right. A claim circulating online needs checking against the actual tribunal record before a client is told how to respond, and that record needs to stay on file afterwards as the basis for what was said.
Every record on Vizlegal links back to its originating source: the WRC adjudication, the Tax Appeals determination, the High Court judgment, the regulator's decision. Not a press release, not a secondary report. Where the document is long, practitioner-tested AI summaries give a bullet breakdown and a narrative of the reasoning and the disposition, so a 90-page judgment becomes usable lines in minutes, with the full text one click away for the passages that matter.
The client patches this covers
Agencies tend to ask first whether their own client work is in scope. Six areas account for most of it.
Litigation and reputation management. Defamation actions, injunctions, and judicial reviews, from the moment proceedings issue rather than the moment they are reported.
Planning and strategic infrastructure. Planning applications across all 31 local authorities and An Coimisiún Pleanála cases, followed through to any challenge in the High Court.
Data protection. Decisions and enforcement from the Data Protection Commission, alongside decisions of the Office of the Information Commissioner.
Tax. Tax Appeals Commission determinations, which often carry the detail a client's financial position turns on.
Trademarks and brand protection. The trademarks register, searchable alongside court and tribunal records, so an application or a dispute shows up in the same query as everything else on a name.
Intelligence reports, prepared for your client
Beyond the platform itself, our team prepares briefings built around a specific client. Two kinds are most useful to agencies.
The first is thematic. A report on a matter of strategic importance to the client, setting out the trend across the sector, the decisions that have already landed, and the questions still open.
The second tracks a footprint. We follow a named individual, organisation, or public body across Vizlegal's sources and report what appears, whether that is a regulator whose decisions shape a client's sector or a company under sustained scrutiny. Each briefing is written in plain English and grounded in primary sources, and agencies use them as a client-service deliverable in their own name.
Getting started
Subscriptions run month to month with no long lock-in. For agency-wide or practice-wide access, we tailor the licence to how the team is structured, whether that is one consultant on a client patch or a full public affairs practice. It works on mobile, tablet, and desktop, with alerts delivered by email, Slack, or Teams.
To see it running on the clients, sectors, and regulators your team covers, book a demo or get in touch at vizlegal.com/contact.