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.