Federal Litigation Monitor — New Filings by Company

A new federal lawsuit is public record the moment it's filed — but checking PACER costs money per page, and you have to know which of 94 district courts to search. CourtListener (the Free Law Project's RECAP archive) mirrors PACER filings into a free, keyless, searchable index. Paid tools like Docket Alarm and Trellis sell exactly this kind of monitoring.

This matches new federal filings against a company watchlist.

Input

{ "companies": ["Apple Inc.", "Tesla, Inc."], "daysBack": 30 }

Use the full legal name where possible — "Apple" alone can miss cases captioned with the full "Apple Inc." Each company is one array entry, not a comma-separated string (a legal name can itself contain a comma, like "Tesla, Inc.").

Sample output

{
  "caseName": "trinamiX Sensing LLC v. Apple, Inc.",
  "court": "W.D. Tex.",
  "docketNumber": "7:26-cv-00348",
  "dateFiled": "2026-09-03",
  "party1": "trinamiX Sensing LLC",
  "party2": "Apple, Inc.",
  "companyRole": "second-named party",
  "docketUrl": "https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/74743989/..."
}

Typical uses

• Legal/compliance monitoring — know within a day when your company or a company you track gets sued.
• Investor risk research — new litigation is a material signal; watch a portfolio company or acquisition target.
• Journalism / competitive intelligence — track a competitor's or newsworthy company's litigation activity.
• Insurance underwriting — litigation frequency is real underwriting signal for certain lines.

Pricing

$0.003 per matched case.

⚠️ Read before you act

• companyRole is deliberately honest, not confident. It reports "first-named party" / "second-named party" based on the party list's actual position — not a guessed plaintiff/defendant label. Verified live that this matters: one real Tesla case had Tesla listed FIRST in the party array despite being the defendant in the caption ("Sheehan v. Tesla, Inc.") — case-party ordering doesn't reliably follow caption order for every filing type. Read caseName to judge actual posture.
• This covers federal courts only (via PACER/RECAP), not state courts — most consumer litigation and many commercial disputes are filed in state court and won't appear here.
• RECAP's coverage depends on someone having pulled the document — it's a crowd-sourced mirror of PACER, not a complete real-time feed of every filing the instant it's docketed. Coverage is strong for higher-profile cases, thinner for routine ones.

FAQ

• Do I need an API key? No — CourtListener's API is free and keyless.
• Why does the same company sometimes show as party1 and sometimes party2? Real party-list ordering doesn't always match the case caption — see the caveat above. This is why the field is named companyRole, not plaintiffOrDefendant.
• Can I search state court cases? No — this actor covers RECAP's federal district court coverage only.

Related actors

• Insider Trading Monitor — another official-filing-turned-signal actor, for SEC Form 4 insider trades instead of litigation.
• SEC EDGAR Filings — material 8-K corporate events, a different signal for the same kind of company-risk monitoring.

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• Federal Litigation Monitor — New Filings by Company declares all 13 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of Federal Litigation Monitor include matchedCompany, caseName, court, docketNumber, dateFiled and dateTerminated.
• Federal Litigation Monitor needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Every one of Federal Litigation Monitor's 4 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
• Federal Litigation Monitor documents dateTerminated as: Date the record was terminated or closed.
• Every number published about Federal Litigation Monitor is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• Federal Litigation Monitor is filed under developer tools and business so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• Federal Litigation Monitor reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.