SEC Litigation Releases — Enforcement Tracker

Real-time scraper for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's litigation releases — the official announcements of civil enforcement actions, complaints, consent judgments, and final judgments filed by the SEC against companies and individuals.

Built for equity research analysts, compliance and AML teams, M&A and PR firms, and legal-tech / regulatory monitoring platforms who need clean, structured access to SEC enforcement activity without hand-scraping the SEC website.

Data covers Securities and Exchange Commission v. … actions across all SEC regional offices, including securities fraud cases, insider trading charges, investment-adviser violations, Ponzi-scheme prosecutions, FCPA cases, market-manipulation actions, and accounting-fraud cases.

What it does

• Crawls the SEC litigation-releases index at sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases
• Filters by year range (SEC publishes releases from ~1995 onwards)
• Optional case-insensitive keyword filter on title + summary
• For each release, fetches the full release page and extracts: release number, date, case caption, descriptive title, defendant list, body excerpt, and the linked complaint / judgment PDF

The actor sends the SEC-required User-Agent on every request and self-throttles below the SEC's published 10 req/sec rate limit.

Use cases

• Compliance & AML monitoring — daily / weekly sweep of new SEC enforcement actions, joined against your customer or counter-party list to flag named defendants in new complaints, settlements, or final judgments.
• Equity research & event-driven trading — track SEC charges against public companies and their executives, feed into news-event databases for backtesting or alpha generation.
• PR firms & M&A bankers — early signal on reputational events for prospective targets and clients; identify companies under active SEC enforcement before they hit mainstream press.
• Legal-tech & regulatory platforms — enrich case databases with structured SEC enforcement metadata and the URLs of underlying complaints and judgments.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
yearStart	integer	2026	Earliest year of releases to fetch (SEC publishes from ~1995).
yearEnd	integer	2026	Most recent year of releases to fetch.
maxReleases	integer	50	Hard cap on total releases returned across the year range.
keywordFilter	string	""	Optional case-insensitive substring filter on title + summary.

Output schema

Each dataset item:

{
  "release_number": "LR-26557",
  "date_published": "2026-05-21",
  "title": "SEC Obtains Final Consent Judgment as to former Alabama Investment Adviser",
  "defendants": ["Daughtry"],
  "summary_excerpt": "On May 20, 2026, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama entered a final consent judgment against James Blake Daughtry...",
  "action_type": "final-judgment",
  "complaint_url": "https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/litreleases/2026/judg26557.pdf",
  "source_url": "https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-26557",
  "scraped_at": "2026-05-28T12:00:00Z"
}

Field notes

• release_number — SEC litigation release identifier (LR-NNNNN).
• date_published — ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD) from the SEC publish-date field.
• title — descriptive title of the action.
• defendants — parsed from the case caption (SEC v. …); falls back to the page heading.
• summary_excerpt — first 500 characters of the release body.
• action_type — heuristic label derived from the title: complaint, settlement, final-judgment, or other.
• complaint_url — first linked complaint / judgment PDF (the underlying court filing).
• source_url — canonical SEC URL for the release (always populated).
• scraped_at — UTC ISO timestamp of the scrape.

Compliance / source-risk

• Data source: public SEC website. SEC explicitly invites programmatic access provided requests include a contact User-Agent.
• This actor sends User-Agent: NexGenData hello@nexgendata.com on every request and stays well under the SEC's published 10 req/sec ceiling.
• The actor scrapes only material the SEC publishes itself — no PII beyond what already appears in public legal filings.

Sample Output