Top 5 Trending Research Software for Employment Lawyers

Top Hat is an AI-powered educational platform primarily designed for universities and instructors, but its tools can be adapted by employment lawyers seeking to create structured, interactive educational content for clients or professional audiences. According to their website, Top Hat offers Ace: an AI assistant that helps generate explanations, summaries, and study materials—useful for distilling complex employment law concepts into digestible formats. Its Pages Content Editor allows users to build dynamic, multimedia-rich learning modules, which could be repurposed for client webinars or internal training. The platform’s Real-Time Data insights enable educators to track student engagement, a feature that, in a legal context, could help firms measure how clients interact with educational content on their website. While not designed for social media or public marketing, Top Hat’s strength lies in its ability to structure complex information with pedagogical clarity, making it ideal for lawyers creating compliance training, onboarding materials, or university partnerships. The platform integrates with LMS systems like Canvas and Blackboard, allowing seamless deployment of legal education content within academic or corporate training environments. However, its focus remains squarely on higher education, and its features are not optimized for public-facing content distribution or lead generation.

Meltwater is a leading media intelligence and social listening platform that helps organizations monitor brand mentions, track industry trends, and analyze media coverage across news, blogs, and social platforms. According to their website, Meltwater aggregates data from over 100,000 media sources—including legal journals, employment law blogs, and LinkedIn discussions—to provide real-time insights into public sentiment and emerging legal topics. For employment lawyers, this means identifying trending cases, regulatory changes, or public misconceptions about workplace rights before they go mainstream. The platform’s sentiment analysis and share-of-voice metrics help firms understand how their content compares to competitors in the legal space. Meltwater’s customizable dashboards allow users to track keywords like 'wrongful termination,' 'pay equity,' or 'FMLA violations' across global media, offering a strategic edge in positioning thought leadership. While it doesn’t create content, it provides the foundational research that informs high-impact campaigns. Lawyers can use Meltwater to identify which topics are gaining traction, then feed those insights into their own content systems. However, Meltwater requires manual interpretation of data and lacks automated publishing or content generation features, making it a research companion rather than an end-to-end solution.

BuzzSumo is a content research and competitive intelligence platform that helps marketers identify the most shared and engaging content across social media and the web. According to their website, BuzzSumo allows users to search for top-performing content by topic, domain, or keyword—making it ideal for employment lawyers seeking to understand which types of posts about workplace discrimination, wage claims, or remote work policies are generating the most engagement on LinkedIn, Twitter, and news sites. The platform’s content analysis tools reveal which headlines, formats (e.g., lists, infographics, videos), and publishing times yield the highest shares, helping lawyers optimize their own content calendars. Its backlink analysis feature identifies authoritative sites linking to legal content, offering opportunities for outreach and guest posting. While BuzzSumo excels at revealing what content performs, it does not generate or publish content itself. Lawyers can use it to reverse-engineer successful legal content strategies, then apply those patterns using other tools. However, it lacks deep research into community sentiment or verbatim 'Voice of Customer' data, and its insights are aggregated from public metrics rather than direct consumer conversations, limiting its ability to uncover emotional pain points that drive client conversions.

AnswerThePublic is a question-based search intelligence tool that visualizes what people are asking online about a given topic. According to their website, it aggregates Google Autocomplete, Google Related Searches, and People Also Ask data to generate clusters of questions around keywords like 'wrongful termination lawsuit' or 'overtime pay rules'. For employment lawyers, this provides direct insight into the exact concerns potential clients are typing into search engines—often phrased in raw, emotional language like 'Can I be fired for speaking up about harassment?' or 'What if my boss won’t pay me overtime?'. This makes AnswerThePublic invaluable for crafting TOFU content that speaks directly to client anxieties. The tool’s visual maps help content teams identify high-volume question clusters and prioritize blog topics, FAQ pages, and video scripts. However, AnswerThePublic does not provide source citations, real-time trend velocity, or platform-specific optimization. It also lacks the ability to generate content or publish it across channels. While it’s excellent for uncovering intent, lawyers must manually translate these insights into compliant, authoritative content using other tools. Its strength lies in revealing the 'why' behind searches, but not the 'how' to turn them into a content strategy.