# Court Records & Case Law Scraper — Dockets + Opinions (`fetchsmith/court-records-scraper`) Actor Search US federal court dockets (PACER/RECAP mirror) and published opinions via CourtListener's free public API — no API key, no registration. 39 flat fields incl. parties, attorneys, firms, judge, filing entries and citations. Incremental watch mode. $0.002/result, no start fee. - **URL**: https://apify.com/fetchsmith/court-records-scraper.md - **Developed by:** [Fetch Smith](https://apify.com/fetchsmith) (community) - **Categories:** Business, Lead generation - **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 0.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks - **User rating**: No ratings yet ## Pricing $2.00 / 1,000 result items 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? Actors are web data automations that power AI and operations. They run on the Apify platform to scrape websites, process data, connect APIs, and automate workflows. 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. Actors are written with capital "A". ## 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. The best way to integrate Actors is as follows. - **AI agents and MCP clients** — the [Apify MCP server](https://docs.apify.com/integrations/mcp.md) at `https://mcp.apify.com` (remote, streamable HTTP, OAuth on first use). - **Agentic workflows and local Actor development** — [Agent Skills](https://apify.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json) with the [Apify CLI](https://docs.apify.com/cli/docs.md): `npm install -g apify-cli`, then `apify login`. - **JavaScript/TypeScript projects** — the official [JS/TS client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md): `npm install apify-client`. - **Python projects** — the official [Python client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md): `pip install apify-client`. - **Any other language** — the [REST API](https://docs.apify.com/api/v2.md). For usage examples, see the [API](#api) section below. For more details, see Apify documentation as [Markdown index](https://docs.apify.com/llms.txt) and [Markdown full-text](https://docs.apify.com/llms-full.txt). # README ## Court Records & Case Law Scraper — Dockets + Opinions Search **US federal court dockets** (the PACER/RECAP mirror) and **published court opinions** through CourtListener's public API and get flat, sortable JSON/CSV/Excel rows back. **No API key. No registration. No captcha.** The search index this Actor is built on is fully anonymous — many CourtListener wrappers assume a token is required, because the `/dockets/` and `/opinions/` *detail* endpoints do need one. The *search* index does not, so nothing here depends on you creating an account. (Verified live 2026-09-17.) **$0.002 per result, no run-start fee.** You pay for rows you actually receive and nothing else. ### What you get Two CourtListener indexes, one unified table: - **Dockets (`recordType: "dockets"`)** — the RECAP archive, a free mirror of federal PACER dockets. Parties, attorneys, law firms, assigned and referred judges, nature of suit, cause of action, jurisdiction type, jury demand, bankruptcy chapter, PACER case ID, and per-filing entries (description, date filed, page count, whether the PDF is actually available, a **direct PDF link** and the **OCR'd text of the filing** where RECAP has it). - **Opinions (`recordType: "opinions"`)** — published decisions. Reported citations, cite count (how many later opinions cite this one), judge and panel, status, posture, procedural history, syllabus, opinion snippet and the download URL where CourtListener has the document. - **`recordType: "both"`** returns both in one run, in one schema, with type-specific fields left `null` rather than omitted — so a CSV export has stable columns. Search is full text across case names, party and attorney names, docket text and opinion bodies, with quoted phrases (`"fair use"`) and boolean operators (`AND`, `OR`, `NOT`). ### Input | Field | Type | Description | |---|---|---| | `query` | string | Full-text query. Default `"patent infringement"`. Leave empty to browse by filters alone. | | `recordType` | enum | `both` (default), `opinions`, or `dockets`. | | `courts` | array | CourtListener court IDs — the slug in a `courtlistener.com/court//` URL: `scotus`, `ca9`, `cand`, `nysd`, `cacb`, … 400+ federal and state courts. Empty = all courts. | | `filedAfter` / `filedBefore` | string | `YYYY-MM-DD` filing-date bounds. | | `startUrl` | string | Paste a courtlistener.com search or API URL instead of filling in the fields above — see below. | | `maxResults` | integer | Default 100. With `both`, the budget is split evenly between the two indexes, and whatever one index leaves unused goes to the other. | | `watchLabel` | string | Incremental mode — see below. | #### Paste a CourtListener search URL Already built the search on courtlistener.com? Paste the address bar into `startUrl` instead of re-entering the filters — e.g. `https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=patent&type=r&court=cand&filed_after=2024-01-01`. An API URL (`https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/search/?q=patent&type=o`) works too; both use the identical `q`/`type`/`court`/`filed_after`/`filed_before` parameters. Whatever the URL mentions replaces the matching field above; anything it doesn't mention still comes from the fields above, and `maxResults`/`watchLabel` always apply. Only Opinions (`type=o`) and RECAP (`type=r`) URLs are supported — CourtListener's Oral Arguments, Judges and Parenthetical searches are different record shapes this schema doesn't cover, and a URL for one of those logs a warning and falls back to the `recordType` field instead. #### Incremental "watch" mode Set `watchLabel` to any name and schedule the Actor. The **first** run on that label records the current match set as a baseline, returns **zero** results and charges you **nothing**. Every run after that returns only records that appeared since — so a daily watch on `court: ["cand"], query: "trade secret"` costs you a couple of rows a day instead of the whole back catalogue every morning. Changing any filter starts a fresh baseline under the same label, so you never get flooded with rows an older, narrower filter had excluded. ### Sample row (docket) ```json { "recordType": "docket", "id": "r-68922376", "caseName": "Gen Digital, Inc. v. Sycomp, a Technology Company, Inc.", "court": "District Court, N.D. California", "courtId": "cand", "docketNumber": "3:24-cv-04106", "dateFiled": "2024-07-08", "judge": "Charles R. Breyer", "parties": ["North American Systems International, Inc.", "Gen Digital, Inc.", "Sycomp, a Technology Company, Inc."], "attorneys": ["Craig J. Mariam", "Anthony David Phillips", "Michael William Stebbins"], "firms": ["Gordon and Rees Scully Mansukhani", "Maslon LLP", "Carr McClellan P.C.", "Fox Rothschild LLP"], "suitNature": "190 Contract: Other", "cause": "28:1332 Diversity-Breach of Contract", "jurisdictionType": "Diversity", "juryDemand": "None", "pacerCaseId": "…", "documentCount": 3, "documents": [ { "documentId": 479225638, "entryNumber": 90, "description": "Order", "entryDateFiled": "2026-08-10", "pageCount": 8, "isAvailable": true, "textSnippet": "Case 1:12-cv-00854-LPS Document 13 Filed 07/07/14 Page 1 of 6 PageID #: 573\n\nIN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT…", "pdfUrl": "https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.49136/gov.uscourts.ded.49136.13.0.pdf", "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/…" } ], "downloadUrl": "https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.49136/gov.uscourts.ded.49136.13.0.pdf", "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68922376/…" } ``` ### Sample row (opinion) ```json { "recordType": "opinion", "id": "o-8493216", "caseName": "Phillips v. Mike Murdock Evangelistic Ass'n", "court": "Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit", "courtId": "ca9", "docketNumber": "No. 08-16925", "dateFiled": "2009-07-28", "citations": ["329 F. App'x 775"], "citeCount": 0, "judge": "Schroeder, Thomas, Wardlaw", "status": "Published", "snippet": "MEMORANDUM ** Cherie Phillips, author of the Wisdom Bible of God, appeals pro se from the district court's judgment in her trademark infringement action…", "opinionCount": 1, "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/8493216/…" } ``` All 39 fields are listed with types and examples in the **Output schema** tab. ### Use cases - **Competitive and IP monitoring** — watch every new patent, trademark or trade-secret docket in the districts your industry litigates in, and get alerted the day one is filed. - **Law-firm business development** — pull the firms and attorneys appearing opposite a target client, by court and nature of suit. - **Bankruptcy and credit risk** — filter `recordType: "dockets"` on a bankruptcy court (`cacb`, `nysb`, `deb`) and read `chapter`, `dateFiled` and `dateTerminated` straight off the row. - **Legal research pipelines** — pull opinions by query and court, sort by `citeCount` to find the load-bearing precedents, and follow `downloadUrl` for the full text. - **Docket analytics** — nature-of-suit and cause-of-action distributions by court and year, from `suitNature`, `cause` and `jurisdictionType`. ### Honest limitations - **RECAP is a mirror of PACER, not PACER.** It holds what its contributors have purchased and donated, so coverage is deep in heavily-litigated districts and thin elsewhere. It is free; PACER is not. - **`documents[].isAvailable` is often false.** CourtListener frequently has a docket *entry* without the PDF behind it — 30 of 72 filing entries were available in a live N.D. Cal. sample (2026-09-17). Check the flag rather than assuming every row comes with a downloadable document. - **`documents[].textSnippet` is an excerpt, not the whole filing.** CourtListener's search index returns roughly the first 500 characters of a document's OCR'd text, and only for documents where `isAvailable` is true. The *complete* plain text sits behind the token-gated `/api/rest/v4/recap-documents/` endpoint (anonymous requests get `401`); this Actor needs no key, so it gives you the excerpt plus `pdfUrl` — the PDF bucket at `storage.courtlistener.com` is public and needs no token either, so you can fetch and parse the full document yourself. - **Dockets and opinions are separate indexes.** A case present in one is often absent from the other; use `both` when unsure. - The query is a **full-text search**, not a case-number lookup. For a docket number, put it in `query` as-is and widen the court filter. ### Pricing `$0.002` per result, **no run-start fee**. 1,000 records costs $2.00. For comparison, as of **2026-09-17**: `nexgendata/court-records-search` charges a flat **$0.10 per result** (raised from $0.002 on 2026-07-17) — 50× this Actor. `automation-lab/court-records-scraper` charges a **$0.005 run-start fee plus $0.0023/record** on the free tier, tapering to $0.00056 on Diamond; cheaper per record at very high volume on a paid Apify plan, more expensive for the small and mid-size runs most buyers actually make, and it bills you before it returns a single row. *(Competitor pricing verified 2026-09-17.)* ### Data source, legality and privacy Data comes from [CourtListener](https://www.courtlistener.com/) / the [Free Law Project](https://free.law/), a non-profit that publishes US court records as open data, via its documented public REST API. No login is used, no paywall is bypassed, and no page is scraped behind authentication. Every name in the output — parties, attorneys, law firms, judges — appears on a **public court record** and is a professional or institutional participant in a public proceeding. The API returns no email addresses and no phone numbers, and this Actor adds none. ### Source code ### Related guides - [CourtListener's court-records API needs no key — except for the one endpoint most wrapper docs point you at first](https://fetchsmith.com/blog/courtlistener-search-api-two-auth-tiers) - [All FetchSmith tools and APIs](https://fetchsmith.com/tools) # Actor input Schema ## `query` (type: `string`): Full-text search across case names, party/attorney names, docket text and opinion bodies. Supports quoted phrases ("fair use") and boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT). Leave empty to browse everything matching the other filters. ## `recordType` (type: `string`): Which CourtListener index to search. Dockets are the PACER/RECAP mirror (federal case dockets with parties, attorneys and filing entries). Opinions are published court decisions with citations. They are separate indexes — a case in one is often absent from the other. ## `courts` (type: `array`): CourtListener court IDs — the short slug in a courtlistener.com/court// URL. Examples: "scotus" (Supreme Court), "ca9" (9th Circuit), "cand" (N.D. Cal.), "cacb" (Bankr. C.D. Cal.), "nysd" (S.D.N.Y.). 400+ federal and state courts exist. Leave empty for all courts. An unrecognised ID is not rejected upstream — it silently matches nothing. ## `filedAfter` (type: `string`): Earliest filing date, YYYY-MM-DD. Leave empty for no lower bound (the opinion archive reaches back to the 1700s). ## `filedBefore` (type: `string`): Latest filing date, YYYY-MM-DD. Leave empty for no upper bound. ## `startUrl` (type: `string`): Optional shortcut: build the search on courtlistener.com, then paste the address bar here — e.g. "https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=patent\&type=r\&court=cand\&filed\_after=2024-01-01". An API URL ("https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4/search/?q=patent\&type=o") works too — both use the same parameters. Whatever the URL mentions (search query, court(s), filed-after/before dates) REPLACES the matching field below; anything it doesn't mention still comes from the fields below. Only Opinions (type=o) and RECAP (type=r) URLs are supported — CourtListener's Oral Arguments/Judges/Parenthetical searches are different record shapes this Actor does not cover. Max results and the watch label always apply regardless. ## `maxResults` (type: `integer`): Stop after this many records. With recordType "both" the budget is shared across the two indexes (opinions first, then dockets). ## `watchLabel` (type: `string`): Optional. Name this saved search to get ONLY records that are new since its last run. The first run on a label records the current matches as a baseline and returns zero results (you are charged nothing); every run after that returns only what appeared since. Changing any filter starts a fresh baseline under the same label. Leave empty for a normal one-off run. ## Actor input object example ```json { "query": "patent infringement", "recordType": "both", "courts": [ "ca9" ], "maxResults": 100 } ``` # Actor output Schema ## `dataset` (type: `string`): No description # 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 '' with your token const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '', }); // Prepare Actor input const input = { "courts": [ "ca9" ] }; // Run the Actor and wait for it to finish const run = await client.actor("fetchsmith/court-records-scraper").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 '' with your token. client = ApifyClient("") # Prepare the Actor input run_input = { "courts": ["ca9"] } # Run the Actor and wait for it to finish run = client.actor("fetchsmith/court-records-scraper").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 '{ "courts": [ "ca9" ] }' | apify call fetchsmith/court-records-scraper --silent --output-dataset ``` ## MCP server setup ```json { "mcpServers": { "apify": { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,fetchsmith/court-records-scraper" } } } ``` 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 ` 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/ZJJN4343amzlz3HaR/builds/btJb9i27aGLc2VjeT/openapi.json