⚖️ Court Records Search — Public Case Data

Pull public U.S. court records — opinions and federal RECAP dockets together — from a single query, without a PACER login or per-page fee. Court Records Search runs your case-name, party, or keyword across CourtListener's opinions and RECAP archives in one pass, returning case name, court, filing date, docket number, nature of suit, judge, and a direct link. It is the broad on-ramp for KYC, background diligence, and compliance teams who need a fast public-record sweep before drilling into a specific opinion or docket.

📊 Sample Output

caseName	court	courtId	dateFiled	status	source
Watson Bowman Acme Corp. v. RGW Construction, Inc.	California Court of Appeal	calctapp	2016-08-09	Published	courtlistener.com
Calixto v. Watson Bowman Acme Corp.	District Court, S.D. Florida	flsd	2009-06-02	Published	courtlistener.com
Enduracoat Technologies, Inc. v. Watson Bowman Acme Corp.	Louisiana Court of Appeal	lactapp	2010-07-08	Published	courtlistener.com
Plank v. Watson Bowman Acme Corp.	Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York	nyappdiv	2007-12-21	Published	courtlistener.com
Arrow-Acme Corp. v. Bellamy	Court of Appeals of Iowa	iowactapp	1993-03-30	Published	courtlistener.com
Astarita v. Acme Bus Corp.	New York Supreme Court	nysupct	2017-02-14	Published	courtlistener.com

Real rows from run xFoPFklCRHhh2eI7D on build 0.0.15 (2026-09-25), unedited apart from masked emails/phones and shortened long text; fields the source does not publish are empty.

🧾 JSON sample record

One real record from run xFoPFklCRHhh2eI7D (emails/phones masked, long text shortened):

{
  "caseName": "Watson Bowman Acme Corp. v. RGW Construction, Inc.",
  "court": "California Court of Appeal",
  "courtId": "calctapp",
  "dateFiled": "2016-08-09",
  "dateArgued": "",
  "docketNumber": "F070067",
  "suitNature": "",
  "citation": [
    "2 Cal. App. 5th 279",
    "206 Cal. Rptr. 3d 281",
    "2016 Cal. App. LEXIS 659"
  ],
  "judge": "Franson, Poochigian, Smith",
  "snippet": "\n\n\n  Opinion\n \n\n  FRANSON, J.—\n \n\n  INTRODUCTION\n \n\n  RGW Construction, Inc. (RGW), was the successful low bidder on a Department of Transportation (Caltrans) project for the construction of a Highway 99 overpass near Merced. RGW entered into a contract with Watson Bowman Acme Corporation (Watson) for the delivery of 146 sealed expansion joints for us",
  "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4245751/watson-bowman-acme-corp-v-rgw-construction-inc/",
  "status": "Published",
  "source": "courtlistener.com",
  "recordType": "opinion"
}

💰 Pricing

Event	Price (USD)	When it is charged
Actor Start (apify-actor-start)	$0.00005	Charged when the Actor starts running. Number of events charged depends on Actor memory (one event per GB, minimum one event).
Court case record (apify-default-dataset-item)	$0.1	Single result in the default dataset.

Pay-per-event: you pay only for what the run delivers. A run that delivers nothing bills no result events (only the actor-start event, when the actor defines one). Example: a run that delivers 100 results costs 100 × $0.1 = $10.00 plus the start fee.

What This Actor Does

Court Records Search queries the CourtListener API (/api/rest/v4/search/) across two record types in one run: court opinions (decisions) and federal RECAP dockets (the crowd-sourced mirror of PACER). You provide a search query and an optional court-type filter, and the actor returns normalized, structured JSON — no PACER account, no per-page charge, no scraping fragile HTML.

Pricing

$0.10 per result row delivered (Pay-Per-Event), plus $0.00005 per Actor start per GB of memory. Rows and charges are 1:1 and duplicate rows are removed before billing. A query that matches nothing returns 0 rows and charges nothing. If CourtListener blocks, rate-limits, or changes its response format, the run fails with a message naming the cause instead of finishing green and empty.

Input

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Search term — case name, party, or keyword (required).
courtType	string	federal, state, or all (default all). See the note below.
maxResults	integer	Maximum rows to return, and therefore the maximum billed (default 50).

{ "query": "Acme Corp", "courtType": "federal", "maxResults": 20 }

Note on courtType: federal restricts the opinion search to the Supreme Court and the federal circuits (scotus, ca1–ca11, cadc, cafc). state and all behave the same today — CourtListener's v4 search results carry no populated jurisdiction facet, so a state-only filter cannot be applied honestly at this layer. The run's status message says so on every state run.

Output

Each result is a flat JSON object. Opinion rows and docket rows share most fields; docket rows add assignedTo, referredTo, and cause. Every row carries recordType (opinion or docket).

{
  "caseName": "Watson Bowman Acme Corp. v. RGW Construction, Inc.",
  "court": "California Court of Appeal",
  "courtId": "calctapp",
  "dateFiled": "2016-08-09",
  "dateArgued": "",
  "docketNumber": "F070067",
  "suitNature": "",
  "citation": ["2 Cal. App. 5th 279", "206 Cal. Rptr. 3d 281"],
  "judge": "Franson, Poochigian, Smith",
  "snippet": "Opinion FRANSON, J.— INTRODUCTION RGW Construction, Inc. …",
  "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4245751/watson-bowman-acme-corp-v-rgw-construction-inc/",
  "status": "Published",
  "source": "courtlistener.com",
  "recordType": "opinion"
}

Use Cases

• Conflicts & exposure checks — sweep opinions and dockets for a new client or adversary in one call.
• KYC / AML name screening — batch public-record checks during counterparty onboarding.
• Pre-deal diligence — map a target company's litigation footprint before a transaction.
• Litigation research on-ramp — a fast first pass before drilling into a specific opinion or docket.

About NexGenData

NexGenData publishes buyer-intent actors covering U.S. public-records search, SEC filings, lead generation, competitive intelligence, and MCP servers for AI agents. All pay-per-result. Browse the full catalog at https://apify.com/nexgendata?fpr=2ayu9b

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Run it on a schedule

A weekly run is a sensible cadence for a watch list of party or company names, because new opinions and dockets are added to CourtListener as they come in. Each run searches CourtListener's opinions and RECAP dockets again, so new cases appear next to ones you have already seen. The actor has no new-only mode, so compare the url or docketNumber of each row with your last run to spot new matches. For rolling monitoring of new federal filings only, use the Federal Litigation Records actor listed below. Send each run's results onward with a webhook, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make or the Apify API.

Video guides from Apify: Schedule your Actor · Integrations

FAQ

Why use this instead of the official PACER system or the CourtListener website?

This actor searches CourtListener's opinions and its RECAP archive of PACER dockets in one pass, so you need no PACER account and pay no per-page PACER fee for covered records. It returns normalized JSON with case name, court, filing date, docket number, nature of suit, judge and a direct link, and every row says whether it is an opinion or a docket. You can run it from the API or on a schedule. Dockets that are not in the RECAP archive are not covered.

What does a typical run cost?

You pay per result, not for run time: $0.10 for each row in the results, plus $0.00005 per run start (charged per GB of run memory, minimum one). A run that returns 50 court records costs about $5.00. Live prices are always shown in the Pricing tab.

How do I search US court records for a company name?

Put the company name in query, choose courtType, and set maxResults. With all (the default) you get federal and state opinions plus federal RECAP dockets. Duplicate rows are removed before billing, and a query that matches nothing returns no rows and no charge.

Can I search only state courts?

Not as a filter. State opinions are included in the default all search, but state behaves the same as all today because CourtListener's search results carry no usable jurisdiction field. The run status message says so on every state run. federal does work, and limits opinions to the Supreme Court and the federal circuits.

Why did my court records run fail?

CourtListener rate-limits anonymous callers. The actor retries four times, following Retry-After, and then fails with a status message naming the cause. It also fails, rather than finishing empty, if CourtListener blocks it or changes its response format. Nothing is charged on a failed run.

Related actors

• Federal Litigation Records — PACER/RECAP Data API — monitor new federal filings by topic, company or firm.
• US Court Opinions & Case Law Search API — deeper opinion fields, with citations and cite counts.
• RECAP PACER Federal Docket Search API — dig into a single federal docket.
• US Federal & State Judges Database API — look up the judges named in your results.
• Legal Data MCP — Case Law, Dockets & Filings for AI Agents — give an AI agent the same legal search tools.