# Federal Litigation Monitor — New Filings by Company (`alaudinburki/litigation-monitor`) Actor

New federal court filings matched against your company watchlist, via CourtListener/RECAP's free public mirror of PACER — the kind of monitoring paid tools like Docket Alarm sell. Party role is reported honestly (first/second-named party), not a guessed plaintiff/defendant label.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/alaudinburki/litigation-monitor.md
- **Developed by:** [alaudin burki](https://apify.com/alaudinburki) (community)
- **Categories:** Developer tools, Business
- **Stats:** 1 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $3.00 / 1,000 results

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## 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

```json
{ "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

```json
{
  "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.

# Actor input Schema

## `companies` (type: `array`):

Company names to watch for new federal court filings, e.g. Apple Inc., Tesla, Inc. Use the full legal name where possible for the best match.

## `daysBack` (type: `integer`):

How many days of new filings to check, up to 5 years.

## `maxCasesPerCompany` (type: `integer`):

How many matching cases to return per company.

## `maxItems` (type: `integer`):

Hard cap on items returned across all companies. You are never charged beyond this.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "companies": [
    "Apple Inc."
  ],
  "daysBack": 30,
  "maxCasesPerCompany": 20,
  "maxItems": 500
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

Matched federal court filings, most recent first.

## `qualityReport` (type: `string`):

Companies checked, case counts, and problems.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "companies": [
        "Apple Inc."
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("alaudinburki/litigation-monitor").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "companies": ["Apple Inc."] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("alaudinburki/litigation-monitor").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "companies": [
    "Apple Inc."
  ]
}' |
apify call alaudinburki/litigation-monitor --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,alaudinburki/litigation-monitor"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/AMOMHqV9SatDvAWaW/builds/dD2yGXLY6csXmCTlz/openapi.json