THE CHALLENGE
The practice group lives inside federal licensing data: wireless licenses, tower registrations, ownership records, aeronautical studies. Their in-house tool mirrored only a thin slice of it and could barely search past a call sign or an expiry date, so attorneys kept falling back to the public FCC site, which is slow and goes dark during maintenance and government shutdowns – exactly when a filing deadline will not wait. A second attempt at something better had already collapsed: the data model did not match the source, the interface was unusable, and results took too long to return. They did not need another patch. They needed the tool built properly.
WHAT WE DID
We rebuilt it from the ground up, and the first decision was the one that mattered: the platform keeps its own copy of the public FCC and FAA datasets and refreshes them on a schedule, so it keeps working when the government systems do not. On top of that copy we built real search across every field on a license, a tower, an application, or an aeronautical study, plus queries that cross databases, so an attorney can tie a wireless license to its tower and to the related FAA study in a single pass. Geographic search by address, county, and map sits alongside it, and access runs through the firm’s own single sign-on with role-based permissions.
WHAT THEY GOT
One workspace in place of a slow public website and a tool that only answered the easy questions. The data model finally matches the federal sources it draws from, cross-database queries return the whole picture instead of a fragment, and the platform stays available through the outages that used to stop work cold. After two failed attempts, the third was the one that held.
The value
The practice stopped bending its work around a tool that could not keep up. Searches that used to mean juggling the public site and a limited internal mirror now happen in one place, across every dataset, and they do not stall when a federal system goes offline. For a group whose deliverables depend on getting federal data right and on time, that reliability is the product.
- Every field across FCC and FAA sources searchable in one place, not just call sign and expiry.
- Cross-database queries that connect a license, its tower, and the related aeronautical study.
- A local data copy that keeps the platform working through FCC outages and shutdowns.
“We had stopped trusting our own tool and gone back to the FCC website, shutdowns and all. Now the search is right here, it is fast, and it holds every field we actually need. It is the first version that does the job.”
– Partner, telecom regulatory practice