CourtListener Bankruptcy Scraper - Dockets by Chapter
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CourtListener Bankruptcy Scraper - Dockets by Chapter
Scrape US bankruptcy dockets from CourtListener's RECAP archive by chapter, court, debtor, trustee and date, with judges and filings. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel or XML.
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from $3.62 / 1,000 results
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📕 CourtListener Bankruptcy Scraper
🚀 Export US bankruptcy dockets from the CourtListener RECAP archive in seconds. Pick a chapter, a bankruptcy court and a date range, and get one 35-field row per petition with the chapter, the assigned judge, the trustee, every debtor, counsel and law firm, and the filings that matched. The archive holds 35,552,609 bankruptcy dockets across all 94 US bankruptcy courts.
Every consumer and corporate bankruptcy filed in a United States bankruptcy court lands on PACER, and the Free Law Project's RECAP archive mirrors the ones the public has already paid for. This Actor reads that archive through CourtListener's public search API and hands you a flat, spreadsheet-ready row per case: chapter 7 liquidations, chapter 11 reorganizations, chapter 13 repayment plans, chapter 12 farm cases, chapter 9 municipalities and chapter 15 cross-border filings.
The coverage is the whole federal bankruptcy system: 94 courts, 24,978,453 chapter 7 dockets, 10,166,487 chapter 13, 293,351 chapter 11, 23,130 chapter 12 and 2,781 chapter 15. Filters cover chapter, court, debtor name, party name, docket number, docket entry text, document number, free-PDF availability and full text, and each row carries 35 fields with the CourtListener IDs that let you join runs together over time.
| 🎯 Target Audience | 💡 Primary Use Cases |
|---|---|
| Distressed debt and restructuring desks | New chapter 11 filings by court and week, with counsel and the assigned judge |
| Credit and risk teams | Screen a customer or supplier book against fresh chapter 7 and 13 petitions |
| Bankruptcy and creditors-rights firms | Trustee assignments, filing volume by court, and who is appearing before whom |
| Legal tech and analytics vendors | Structured bankruptcy dockets with stable IDs, debtors, counsel and firms |
| Journalists and researchers | Corporate collapses and consumer filing trends, as they are docketed |
📋 What the CourtListener Bankruptcy Scraper does
💡 Why it matters: PACER charges per page and gives you no way to search bankruptcy filings across districts. CourtListener's public API does, but it mixes bankruptcy petitions with the adversary proceedings filed inside them, has no chapter parameter at all, and buries the trustee and the filings in nested JSON. This Actor sends your filters to the API, keeps only the petitions, flattens each docket into one row, and never bills for a record it did not deliver.
- Searches all 94 US bankruptcy courts at once, or the ones you pick from a list.
- Filters by chapter of the Bankruptcy Code, which the API does not expose as a parameter.
- Drops adversary proceedings before billing, so a paid row is always a petition.
- Returns the assigned judge, the trustee, every debtor, counsel and law firm with their CourtListener IDs.
- Attaches the docket entries that matched your query, with PDF availability and PACER document IDs.
- Optionally pulls the full docket timeline for each case, not just the matching entries.
- Cleans the HTML that PACER clerks type into case captions.
- Exports to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML from the dataset tab.
🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)
A walkthrough video is in production. Until it lands, the sample records below are a real run of the default input.
📊 Output
One row per bankruptcy petition. Fields are never null: a value the source can carry but did not comes back as Not Disclosed, a value that does not apply comes back as N/A, and booleans are Yes or No.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
🗂 dataset | cases or dockets, whichever mode produced the row |
🆔 docketId | CourtListener docket ID, stable across runs |
⚖️ caseName | Case caption, which on a petition is the debtor |
🔗 url | Docket page on courtlistener.com |
📕 chapter / 📗 chapterTitle | The chapter as PACER records it, and its Bankruptcy Code heading |
🏛 court / 🏷 courtId / 📎 courtCitationString | Court name, CourtListener court ID (for example deb), reporter-style abbreviation |
🔢 docketNumber | PACER docket number, for example 22-11068 or 3:26-bk-04298 |
🧾 pacerCaseId | PACER's internal case ID |
📅 dateFiled / 🏁 dateTerminated / ⏳ isPending / 📆 daysOnDocket | Filing date, termination date (N/A while pending), Yes or No, and the span in days |
👩⚖️ assignedTo / assignedToId | Bankruptcy judge and their CourtListener ID |
🧑💼 trustee | Trustee of record as PACER writes the name |
👥 debtors / debtorIds / debtorCount | Every party on the docket, semicolon-separated, with IDs and a count |
💼 attorneys / attorneyIds / 🏢 lawFirms / lawFirmIds | Counsel of record and their firms, with IDs |
📄 matchedDocumentCount / 🆓 freeDocumentCount / 📥 hasFreeDocuments | How many filings matched, how many are free to download, and whether any are |
🕐 firstEntryDate / 🕔 latestEntryDate | Oldest and newest entry date among the matched filings |
📂 matchedDocuments / ➕ hasMoreDocuments | The filings that matched (entry number, date, type, description, PDF availability, page count, PACER document ID, URL, text snippet), and whether the docket holds more |
🗓 timeline / timelineEntryCount | The complete docket entry list, present only when includeTimeline is on |
🕓 dateAddedToRecap | When the docket entered the RECAP archive |
🕒 scrapedAt | ISO timestamp of the collection |
❌ error | null on success; error rows carry only this field and are never charged |
Three real records from a run of the default input, with the matchedDocuments array trimmed to its first entry for readability:
✨ Why choose this Actor
| What you get | |
|---|---|
| Petitions, not adversary proceedings | A bankruptcy court indexes two records side by side: the petition, which carries a chapter, and the adversary proceeding filed inside it, which does not. Measured on the Southern District of New York on 2026-09-08: 337,416 dockets, of which 53,454 have no chapter and every one is an adversary caption. Those are screened out before you are billed. |
| A chapter filter the API does not have | CourtListener has no chapter parameter: send chapter=7 or chapter=zzz and you get the same unfiltered count either way. This Actor pushes the chapter through the search index instead, so picking chapter 11 really does return 293,351 dockets out of 35,552,609. |
| All 94 bankruptcy courts, verified | The court list is pulled from CourtListener's own courts endpoint, not typed from memory, and every one of the 94 in-use bankruptcy courts is a pickable option with its full name. |
| Trustee on the row | The trustee of record is the field most bankruptcy tools drop. It is here, alongside the judge, the debtors, counsel and the firms, each with a CourtListener ID so runs join to each other. |
| The filings, and the full timeline on request | The row carries the docket entries that matched your query with PDF availability and page counts. Turn on includeTimeline and each case also gets its complete entry list. |
| No API key needed | CourtListener throttles anonymous callers at 5 requests a minute per IP, and each request returns 20 rows. Turn the proxy on for a fresh exit IP per request, or paste your own free CourtListener key and the throttle disappears. |
| You pay for what you keep | Rows are billed as they are written and capped at maxItems, so a page that overshoots the cap is trimmed before it is charged. Adversary proceedings and duplicates are dropped before billing, never after. |
📈 How it compares to alternatives
| This Actor | Other CourtListener actors | PACER directly | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chapter filter | All six fileable chapters, pickable, pushed through the search index | Usually a free-text box or none | Per-court only, no cross-district search |
| Petitions versus adversary proceedings | Screened by chapter before billing | Mixed feed | Mixed feed |
| Court coverage | 94 bankruptcy courts in one run, from a verified list | Often one court per run | One court per login |
| Trustee, judge, debtors, counsel, firms | On every row, with IDs | Rarely more than judge | Behind the docket sheet, per page |
| Matched filings and full timeline | Matched filings on the row, full timeline opt-in | Sometimes, as a separate mode | Per page |
| Rows a free account can preview | 10 | Varies | None |
| Ceiling | Anonymous API throttle of 5 requests a minute per IP, lifted by a free key or the proxy | Same source, same ceiling | Per-page fees |
🚀 How to use
- Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
- Open the CourtListener Bankruptcy Scraper.
- Pick your chapters, the courts you care about and a date range, then click Start.
- Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.
One typical run: dataset cases, chapters ["11"], courts ["deb","txsb"], filedAfter 01/01/2026, maxItems 200. Run it programmatically through the Apify API or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.
💼 Business use cases
📡 Watch new chapter 11 filings
Set chapters to ["11"], sort by filing date and run it on a schedule. Each run returns the newest reorganizations first, so a diff against the last run is your alert feed. A distressed debt desk sees every new Delaware and Southern District of Texas filing the morning after it is docketed, with the debtor entity names already split out.
🛡️ Screen a customer or supplier book
caseName and partyName search the caption and the party list, which is what PACER indexes. Credit teams run a name list through the Actor on a weekly schedule and flag any hit against their receivables ledger before the next invoice goes out.
🧑💼 Map trustee and judge assignments
The trustee and assignedTo columns turn a year of filings into a table of who is appointed where. Creditors-rights firms use it to see which trustees handle the chapter 7 volume in a district, and which judges take the chapter 11 work.
📊 Measure filing trends
Every row carries the chapter, the court and the filing date, so counts by chapter, court and quarter fall out of a group-by. Economists and analytics vendors feed the stable docketId into their own tables and refresh it on a schedule.
🔌 Automating CourtListener Bankruptcy Scraper
- Make / Zapier: trigger a run on a schedule, then push new rows to a CRM, a Google Sheet or a Slack channel.
- Slack: post each new chapter 11 debtor, court and judge to a restructuring-watch channel.
- Airbyte: land the dataset in Snowflake, BigQuery or Postgres for analytics.
- GitHub: commit the JSON export to a repository to keep a versioned history of filings.
- Google Drive: drop the CSV or Excel export into a shared folder for the credit committee.
🌟 Beyond business use cases
- Research: count chapter 7 versus chapter 13 filings by district and year, or trace how a recession shows up in the docket counts.
- Personal: follow a case you are a creditor in, or check whether a company you deal with has filed.
- Non-profit: monitor consumer bankruptcy volume in the communities you serve, and which trustees are appointed.
- Experimentation: train a model on petition text versus outcome, or build a filing-alert bot on top of the JSON export.
🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper
Give an AI agent live access to US bankruptcy dockets through the Model Context Protocol:
Then prompt it in plain language:
- "List the chapter 11 cases filed in Delaware this month."
- "Which trustees were appointed in chapter 7 cases in the Central District of California in 2026?"
- "Find bankruptcy petitions where the debtor name contains Holdings and the case is still pending."
Copy this into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor to start:
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
❓ Do I need a CourtListener account?
No. The search API answers anonymously and the Actor runs without any key. A free CourtListener API key (Profile > API on courtlistener.com) only removes the anonymous rate limit, which matters for runs of a few thousand rows.
❓ What is the difference between a bankruptcy case and an adversary proceeding?
The bankruptcy case is the petition itself, and it carries a chapter. An adversary proceeding is a lawsuit filed inside that bankruptcy, for example to recover a preference or to challenge a discharge, and it gets its own docket number, a nature of suit and no chapter. This Actor returns the petitions. Adversary proceedings are a different product.
❓ Which chapters can I get?
Chapters 7, 9, 11, 12, 13 and 15, which are the ones a case is actually filed under. Chapters 1, 3 and 5 of the Bankruptcy Code are structural and no case is filed under them, so they are not options.
❓ Does it cover state courts?
No. Bankruptcy is exclusively federal, so the 94 United States bankruptcy courts are the whole universe. State court dockets are a separate Actor.
❓ Why do the newest filings have no judge, trustee or counsel?
RECAP receives the petition first and the parties, counsel and trustee appointment over the following days and weeks. Measured on 2026-09-08: of 20 chapter 11 petitions filed in the previous week, 5 had a judge and 2 had counsel; of 20 chapter 11 cases filed between 2019 and 2021, 19 had a judge and 15 had a trustee. Nothing is invented to fill the gap, so those cells read Not Disclosed until the court reports them.
❓ Why is a case outside the date range I asked for?
CourtListener filters on the filing date that was recorded when the docket was indexed. When the court later corrects that date, the dateFiled returned can fall outside your window. The filter still narrows hard (chapter 11 goes from 293,351 dockets to 22,671 with filedAfter 01/01/2024), but if you need an exact window, filter the dateFiled column after export.
❓ How fast is it, and what is the ceiling?
The API answers in 0.3 to 2.3 seconds and returns 20 rows per request, so a 200-row run is about 10 requests. Anonymously CourtListener allows 5 requests a minute and 50 an hour per IP; a burst of 8 sequential requests passed in 12 seconds, and 35 requests inside 15 minutes earned a 21-minute cooldown. Turn the proxy on for a fresh exit IP per request, or supply a free API key, and the ceiling goes away.
❓ Can I get the PDFs themselves?
The row gives you the CourtListener document URL, the PACER document ID, the page count and whether the PDF is already free in RECAP. freeDocumentCount and hasFreeDocuments tell you at a glance, and availableOnly restricts the run to cases whose filings are already free. The Actor does not download the files.
❓ Does it return the full docket?
Only the entries that matched your query, unless you turn on includeTimeline. That option looks the docket up a second time and attaches up to 100 entries per case, at the cost of one extra request per case.
❓ Why fewer rows than Max Items?
Because every filter is ANDed and the source can simply run out of matches. Adversary proceedings and duplicate dockets are also dropped before writing, so a page of 20 hits can yield fewer than 20 rows. Free accounts are capped at 10 rows per run.
❓ Why does a case caption contain several company names?
PACER writes lead and jointly administered cases into one caption, so a large corporate group appears as one docket with every affiliated debtor in the debtors column. debtorCount tells you how many parties the docket carries.
❓ How fresh is the data?
RECAP mirrors PACER as its users and its own feeds pull dockets down, so a case usually appears within a day of filing. dateAddedToRecap on every row tells you exactly when the archive first saw it.
❓ Does it deduplicate?
Yes, on the CourtListener docket ID, within a run. The same docket can match a search several times through different documents, and it is written and charged once.
❓ How many rows per run?
Up to 1,000,000 on a paid plan, 10 on the free plan. In practice the anonymous rate limit is the binding constraint, so plan on the proxy or a free CourtListener key for anything over a few thousand.
🔌 Integrate with any app
The dataset is available through the Apify API and the JavaScript and Python clients, and every run can be scheduled, triggered by webhook or wired into Make, Zapier, n8n, Airbyte, Google Sheets, Slack and GitHub from the Integrations tab.
🔗 Recommended Actors
- CourtListener Civil Cases Scraper: federal civil dockets by JS-44 nature of suit, the records this Actor deliberately drops.
- CourtListener Business Bankruptcy Scraper: a narrower business-only view of the same archive.
- CourtListener State Court Dockets Scraper: state court dockets, where bankruptcy does not reach.
- CourtListener Opinions Scraper: full opinion text, walked by court feed.
- CourtListener Opinions Scraper: published US case law by court and date.
💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more court, government and public-records scrapers.
🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.
⚠️ Disclaimer: This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Free Law Project or CourtListener. It collects only publicly available court data through the public API. You are responsible for using the data in compliance with CourtListener's terms and applicable laws. Bankruptcy records concern real people: do not use this data to identify, profile, or target individuals.
