Socrata Legal Market Signals n8n Workflow: Sheets & Email

Socrata Legal Market Signals — a daily & weekly n8n workflow that turns public filings into actionable email digests

The Socrata Legal Market Signals n8n Workflow: Sheets & Email automatically pulls recent public-record filings from a Socrata-style open-data API, deduplicates and tags them by legal practice area, logs them in Google Sheets, and sends internal daily + weekly email summaries via SMTP.

What this workflow does

• Runs daily at 7am to check whether your Socrata data source is configured in n8n variables.
• If configured, it builds a Socrata SODA query URL for the lookback window, fetches records via HTTP Request, and normalizes dataset-specific fields.
• It deduplicates signals using workflow static data, then keyword-tags each signal to one or more legal practice areas. Signals that match no configured practice area are dropped.
• Valid tagged signals are appended to a Google Sheets “Signal Log”, while placeholder/invalid items are skipped to avoid blank rows.
• It groups today’s signals by practice area, builds a digest (HTML/text), and emails it via Email Send (SMTP). If no data source is configured, it sends a setup-needed notice.
• Runs every Monday at 8am to read the Google Sheets signal log, compute a lookback summary by practice area (including top signal types), and send the weekly volume report via SMTP.

Use cases

• Legal ops teams want automated market monitoring from open-data filings.
• SaaS operators need structured signal logging in Google Sheets for reporting and auditability.
• Automation engineers want a clear example of Socrata SODA + dedup + practice-area tagging in an n8n workflow.

Technical details

• Schedules: daily 7am and weekly (Monday) 8am
• Nodes/tech: if, code, no op, http request, email send, plus supporting notes/static data
• Integrations: Socrata-style SODA API, Google Sheets, SMTP email

Setup inputs are provided via n8n variables such as SIGNAL_DATA_API_URL, SIGNAL_DATE_FIELD, SIGNAL_ID_FIELD, SIGNAL_TYPE_FIELD, SIGNAL_NAME_FIELD, optional address/link fields, and an optional SIGNAL_DATA_APP_TOKEN to reduce throttling.