CourtListener Creditor Committee Scraper - Chapter 11
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from $4.53 / 1,000 results
CourtListener Creditor Committee Scraper - Chapter 11
Find chapter 11 cases with an official creditors committee in CourtListener RECAP, with the appointment entry and counsel. Export to CSV, Excel, JSON or XML.
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from $4.53 / 1,000 results
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🤝 CourtListener Creditor Committee Scraper
🚀 Export the chapter 11 cases that have an official creditors committee in seconds. One 40-field row per case with the US Trustee's appointment entry, the date the committee was formed, how many days after the petition that was, the committee party names, counsel and firms. The RECAP archive holds 20,340 cases with a committee signal, 3,863 of them chapter 11.
When a company files chapter 11, the US Trustee appoints an official committee of unsecured creditors under section 1102 of the Bankruptcy Code. That committee hires its own counsel and financial advisers, negotiates the plan, and is the single clearest signal that a case is a real restructuring rather than a quiet wind-down. CourtListener has no field for it, so this Actor reconstructs the signal from the two things the RECAP index does expose: the docket entry where the appointment happened, and the committee itself once it is added to the docket as a party.
Coverage is the whole free RECAP archive across all 94 United States bankruptcy courts. Measured on 2026-09-08: 3,476 cases carry a committee appointment entry, 19,373 carry a committee as a party, 20,340 carry at least one of the two, and 3,863 of those are chapter 11. Equity security holder committees (132 cases), tort and asbestos claimant committees (74) and retiree committees (38) are selectable too. Every row is flat, spreadsheet-ready, and carries the CourtListener IDs that let you join runs together over time.
| 🎯 Target Audience | 💡 Primary Use Cases |
|---|---|
| Distressed debt and restructuring desks | Catch the cases where a committee has just been appointed, days after the petition |
| Creditors-rights and bankruptcy firms | Committee counsel appointments by court, firm and year, as a business development feed |
| Claims traders and advisory shops | Screen for chapter 11 cases with an active committee, the ones where claims actually trade |
| Legal analytics vendors | Structured committee formation data with stable docket, judge and firm IDs |
📋 What the CourtListener Creditor Committee Scraper does
💡 Why it matters: the appointment of a creditors committee is the moment a chapter 11 case turns into a negotiation. Nothing on PACER flags it, and searching for it by hand means reading docket sheets one court at a time.
- Finds cases by either committee signal: the appointment entry, the committee as a party, or both.
- Separates the real appointment from the notice of NON-appointment, which uses almost identical wording.
- Reports the appointment date, the entry number, the entry text and the free RECAP PDF link when the document is in the archive.
- Derives
daysToCommittee, the gap between the petition date and the committee appointment. - Splits the party list into debtors and committee parties, and counts each.
- Carries counsel of record and law firms, the assigned judge, the chapter, the court and the PACER case ID.
- Filters by committee kind, chapter, court, case name, docket number, date range, free-PDF availability and free text.
- 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 case. 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 |
|---|---|
⚖️ caseName / 🔗 url | Case caption and the docket page on courtlistener.com |
🆔 docketId / 🔢 docketNumber / 🧾 pacerCaseId | CourtListener docket ID, PACER docket number, PACER internal case ID |
🏛 court / 🏷 courtId / 📎 courtCitationString | Court name, CourtListener court ID (for example txsb), reporter-style abbreviation |
📕 chapter | The chapter as PACER records it |
📅 dateFiled / 🏁 dateTerminated / ⏳ isPending / 📆 daysOnDocket | Petition date, termination date (N/A while pending), Yes or No, and the span in days |
👩⚖️ assignedTo / assignedToId | Bankruptcy judge and their CourtListener ID |
🔎 committeeEvidence | Which signal qualified the case: appointment entry, committee party, both, or the case caption |
👥 committeeKind | Unsecured creditors, equity security holders, retirees, tort claimants, or official committee |
📌 hasAppointmentEntry | Yes when the appointment entry itself is in RECAP |
🗓 committeeAppointedOn / ⏱ daysToCommittee | Date of the appointment entry, and the days between the petition and it |
#️⃣ appointmentEntryNumber / 📝 appointmentDescription / 🔗 appointmentUrl | Docket entry number, the clerk's entry text, and the entry page |
📄 appointmentPdfUrl / 🆓 appointmentIsFree / 📑 appointmentPageCount | Direct free PDF link in the RECAP archive when the document is already there, plus availability and page count |
🔤 appointmentExcerpt | The first 500 characters of the notice's indexed text, which is the caption block |
🤝 committeeParties / 🔢 committeePartyCount | The committee parties on the docket, semicolon-separated, with a count |
🏢 debtors / 🔢 debtorCount | Docket parties that are neither a committee nor the US Trustee |
💼 attorneys / attorneyCount / 🏛 lawFirms / lawFirmCount | Counsel of record and their firms, with counts |
📂 appointmentEntries | Every committee entry that matched, each with entry number, date, text, PDF link, availability, page count and PACER document ID |
👤 parties | Every party on the docket, each flagged isCommittee Yes or No |
🕓 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 appointmentEntries array trimmed to its first entry and the text excerpts shortened for readability:
✨ Why choose this Actor
| What you get | |
|---|---|
| A committee signal the API does not have | CourtListener exposes no committee field. This Actor rebuilds it from the docket entry text and the party list, using the appointment phrasings clerks actually type in each district. Measured 2026-09-08: 3,476 cases by appointment entry, 19,373 by committee party, 20,340 by either. |
| Non-appointment notices removed | "Notice of Non-Appointment of Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors" is one word away from the real thing and it is the most common false positive in this niche. It is filtered out per entry, not per case, so a case that gets a committee later still counts. On the demo search, 3 of 20 hits were non-appointments. |
| Days to committee | The gap between the petition date and the appointment entry is on every row that has an entry. It is the number restructuring desks use to tell a negotiated case from a quiet one, and no other tool publishes it. |
| The free PDF, when it exists | When the appointment notice is already in the free RECAP archive, the row carries a direct link to the PDF on CourtListener's own storage, plus the page count. No PACER login, no per-page fee. |
| Four kinds of committee | Unsecured creditors is the default, and equity security holders, tort and asbestos claimants and retiree committees are one dropdown away, each with its own verified phrase set. |
| All 94 bankruptcy courts | One run covers the whole federal bankruptcy system, or you pick the districts that matter to you from a verified list. |
| You pay for what you keep | Rows are billed as they are written and capped at maxItems. Duplicates and unevidenced hits are dropped before billing, never after. |
📈 How it compares to alternatives
| This Actor | General bankruptcy docket scrapers | PACER directly | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finds cases that have a committee | Yes, by appointment entry or committee party, in one query | No, you get every petition and filter by hand | No, one docket sheet at a time |
| Non-appointment notices | Filtered out per entry | Counted as hits | You read them |
| Appointment date and days to committee | On every row with an entry | Not derived | Not derived |
| Committee member roster | No. The names of the appointed creditors are inside the notice PDF and CourtListener's public API returns only the first 500 characters of that text, which is the caption block | No | Yes, if you pay for the PDF |
| Committee parties, counsel and firms | Split out on the row, with counts | Mixed into one party list | Per docket sheet |
| Court coverage | 94 bankruptcy courts in one run | Varies | One court per login |
| Rows a free account can preview | 10 | Varies | None |
| Ceiling | Anonymous API throttle of 5 requests a minute and 50 an hour 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 Creditor Committee Scraper.
- Leave the defaults for chapter 11 unsecured creditor committees, or pick a committee kind, courts and a date range, then click Start.
- Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.
One typical run: committeeSignal appointment, committeeKind unsecured, chapters ["11"], courts ["deb","txsb","nysb"], filedAfter 01/01/2026, maxItems 200. Run it programmatically through the Apify API or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.
💼 Business use cases
📡 Catch committee formations as they happen
Set committeeSignal to appointment, sort by appointment entry date, and run it on a schedule. A diff against the last run is an alert feed of every chapter 11 case where a committee was just seated, with the court, the judge and the debtor already split out. Restructuring desks use it to decide which cases to staff in the first two weeks.
🧑💼 Track committee counsel appointments
The lawFirms and attorneys columns carry the counsel of record on each committee case. Group a year of rows by firm and court and you have a league table of who is getting committee work in Delaware, the Southern District of New York and the Southern District of Texas, which is exactly the pitch a creditors-rights practice needs for a business development plan.
📊 Measure how fast committees get seated
daysToCommittee turns a year of filings into a distribution. Compare districts, compare judges, and see whether a case with a committee at day 12 behaves differently from one at day 45. Analytics vendors feed the stable docketId into their own tables and refresh on a schedule.
🔍 Screen for cases where claims actually trade
A case with an active committee is a case with a negotiation, a plan process and a claims market. Claims traders and advisory shops filter for committeeEvidence of Appointment entry and committee party, add a court and a date window, and get the shortlist without reading a single docket sheet.
🔌 Automating CourtListener Creditor Committee Scraper
- Make / Zapier: trigger a run on a schedule, then push new committee cases to a CRM, a Google Sheet or a Slack channel.
- Slack: post each new committee appointment, with the 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 committee formations.
- Google Drive: drop the CSV or Excel export into a shared folder for the credit committee.
🌟 Beyond business use cases
- Research: measure how often a committee is appointed by district, by year and by case size, and how that has moved since 2020.
- Personal: find out whether the chapter 11 case you are a creditor in has a committee you could join or contact.
- Non-profit: follow the retiree and tort claimant committees appointed in mass-tort and pension cases.
- Experimentation: train a model on entry text to classify appointment versus non-appointment, or build a committee-formation alert bot on the JSON export.
🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper
Give an AI agent live access to US creditors committee data through the Model Context Protocol:
Then prompt it in plain language:
- "Which chapter 11 cases got a creditors committee in Delaware this year?"
- "How many days after filing was the committee appointed in the Southern District of Texas cases?"
- "List the law firms appearing in chapter 11 cases with an official committee since January."
Copy this into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor to start:
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
❓ Does it return the names of the committee members?
No, and no public tool can. The roster of appointed creditors is inside the notice PDF. CourtListener indexes that document's text but its public API returns only the first 500 characters, which is the court caption block, and a highlighted search fragment is about 120 characters. The document endpoints that would return the full text are authenticated. What you get is the case, the appointment entry, the appointment date, the committee party names, counsel and, when the document is already in the free archive, a direct link to the PDF you can read yourself.
❓ How does it know a case has a committee?
Two signals. The first is the docket entry where the US Trustee appointed the committee, matched on the phrasings clerks actually use, which differ by district. The second is the committee itself once it is added to the docket as a party. committeeEvidence on every row tells you which one qualified the case, and committeeSignal in the input lets you demand one, the other or either.
❓ Does it confuse a non-appointment notice with a real appointment?
No. "Notice of Non-Appointment of Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors" is filtered out at the entry level, so a case that gets a non-appointment notice early and a real committee later still comes back with the real appointment attached. On the default search, 3 of the first 20 hits were non-appointments and none of them were charged.
❓ 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.
❓ Why do so few chapter 11 cases show a committee?
Because RECAP is a mirror of what its users have already paid for on PACER, not a complete copy of PACER. Of 293,434 chapter 11 dockets in the archive, 2,655 carry a committee appointment entry. Committees are also genuinely not appointed in most small chapter 11 and subchapter V cases: the US Trustee appoints one where there is enough unsecured debt to warrant it. Both effects are real and neither is invented away.
❓ What other kinds of committee can I search?
Equity security holders (132 cases), tort and asbestos personal injury claimants (74) and retirees (38), plus a catch-all for any official committee (21,113). Each has its own verified phrase set. Unsecured creditors, at 20,340 cases, is the default because it is the committee section 1102(a)(1) creates in every chapter 11 case where one is warranted.
❓ 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. If you need an exact window, filter the dateFiled column after export.
❓ Why is committeeParties sometimes Not Disclosed on a case that clearly has a committee?
CourtListener truncates the party list it returns on a search hit, so a large case can come back with only the first few parties. When the committee is not in that slice, the row still qualifies on the appointment entry or the case caption, and committeeEvidence says so.
❓ How fast is it, and what is the ceiling?
The API answers in about 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, and the lockout escalates into the hundreds of seconds if you push it. 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 appointment PDF itself?
When the document is already in the free RECAP archive, appointmentPdfUrl is a direct link to it on CourtListener's own storage and appointmentPageCount tells you how long it is. When it is not, the row still carries the entry number and the entry URL, and availableOnly restricts a run to cases whose filings are already free. The Actor does not download files.
❓ Does it cover state courts or non-bankruptcy cases?
No. Official creditors committees are a creature of the United States Bankruptcy Code, so the 94 federal bankruptcy courts are the whole universe. Setting a chapter filter keeps the run inside the bankruptcy petitions; clearing it also pulls in appellate and adversary dockets that mention a committee.
❓ Why fewer rows than Max Items?
Because every filter is ANDed and the source can run out of matches. Duplicate dockets and hits with no committee evidence 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.
❓ 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 and the appointment entry within a day or two of being docketed. dateAddedToRecap on every row tells you when the archive first saw the case.
❓ Does it deduplicate?
Yes, on the CourtListener docket ID, within a run. The same case can match through several entries, 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 rows.
🔌 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 Bankruptcy Scraper: every bankruptcy petition by chapter, court, debtor and trustee, committee or not.
- CourtListener Adversary Scraper: the lawsuits filed inside a bankruptcy, by cover-sheet nature of suit.
- CourtListener Party and Counsel Scraper: one row per party with the law firms and attorneys that represent it.
- CourtListener Judge Analytics Scraper: caseload, opinions and tenure for the judges these cases land in front of.
- CourtListener Civil Cases Scraper: federal civil dockets by JS-44 nature of suit.
💡 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 and real businesses: do not use this data to identify, profile, or target individuals.
