Federal Court Monitor

Track federal court cases, filings and opinions across every US district, appellate and bankruptcy court — powered by the free CourtListener/RECAP archive (Free Law Project). No PACER account, no login, no API key required.

Built for litigation monitoring: watch a party, law firm, judge or case number and pull only the new filings since your last run.

Modes

Mode	What it returns
Search cases	Federal cases matching a party name, keywords, court or docket number — with judge, nature of suit, dates, parties, attorneys
Monitor new filings	A flattened feed of newly filed documents — one row per filing with description, document number, page count and PDF download link
Full docket history	Case metadata + every filed entry for a specific docket number + court
Search opinions	Full-text search over court opinions/judgments

Example inputs

Watch a company's litigation — schedule daily, get only new filings:

{ "mode": "filings", "query": "Tesla Inc", "filedAfter": "2026-09-01" }

All cases against a party in one court:

{ "mode": "cases", "query": "Acme Corp", "court": "deld", "maxResults": 200 }

Pull a full docket:

{ "mode": "docket", "docketNumber": "1:24-cv-00446", "court": "txed" }

Opinions on a legal topic:

{ "mode": "opinions", "query": "class action certification", "filedAfter": "2026-01-01" }

Output fields

• Cases: caseName, docketNumber, courtId, dateFiled, dateTerminated, assignedTo (judge), parties, attorneys, suitNature, cause, pacerCaseId, url
• Filings/docket entries: dateFiled, documentNumber, description, shortDescription, pageCount, downloadUrl (PDF on CourtListener storage, when available), isAvailable, plus case context
• Opinions: caseName, court, dateFiled, judge, citations, snippet, url

Common court IDs

scotus · ca1–ca11, cafc, cadc (circuits) · nysd, nyed, cand, cacd, txed, ded, deld, fld (districts) · bankruptcy courts like nyebke. Leave empty to search all courts.

Who uses this

• Litigation monitoring — get alerted when a competitor, client or portfolio company is sued or files
• Legal research — case law and opinion search across all federal courts
• Litigation finance / journalists — track case progress via the filings feed
• Compliance / KYC — check counterparties for federal litigation history

Scheduling

The filedAfter filter makes this ideal for scheduled runs: set an Apify schedule (e.g. daily) with filedAfter = yesterday, and each run emits only new filings.

Honest notes

• Data comes from the RECAP archive (crowdsourced PACER documents). Coverage is deep — hundreds of millions of docket entries — but not literally every PACER document is in RECAP. isAvailable: false means the filing is indexed but the PDF isn't in the free archive.
• Truly real-time PACER fetching requires a paid PACER account; this actor covers what the free archive has, which for active federal litigation is extensive and near-real-time.
• Rate limits: CourtListener throttles anonymous API use — keep maxResults reasonable or attach an Apify proxy for heavy monitoring.

Pricing

Pay per result — $1.00 per 1,000 rows, scaling down to $0.40 per 1,000 at volume tiers. No per-run fee. Free Apify plan covers ~5,000 rows/month.

Example output

{
  "recordType": "opinion",
  "clusterId": 10817052,
  "caseName": "Santora v. Copyright Claims Board",
  "caseNameFull": null,
  "courtId": "dcd",
  "court": "District Court, District of Columbia",
  "dateFiled": "2026-03-26",
  "judge": "Judge Timothy J. Kelly",
  "docketNumber": "Civil Action No. 2025-1055",
  "citations": [],
  "citedByCount": null,
  "status": "Published",
  "snippet": null,
  "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10817052/santora-v-copyright-claims-board/"
}

FAQ

Does Federal Court Monitor need a login or API key? No — every row comes from public endpoints. Provide a proxy only if your network is heavily rate-limited.

How do I monitor on a schedule? Attach the actor to an Apify Schedule (daily/weekly) and use the watch/monitor mode if present — each run emits a fresh, diff-able dataset.

What does each row contain? See the output fields table above; every row carries a scrapedAt timestamp so datasets can be deduped across runs.

Is it legal to scrape this data? The actor only accesses publicly available data — the same pages/APIs a browser sees. Scraping public data for research, monitoring, and analysis is common practice, but platform Terms of Service and the rules in your jurisdiction still apply to how you use it. Consult legal counsel for your specific case.

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