CourtListener Federal Court Docket Monitor – PACER / Court Data API

A CourtListener API wrapper and federal-court monitor that pulls dockets, opinions and RECAP case filings and normalizes each into a clean record: case name, court, docket number, nature of suit, filing date and a direct link. Use it to build a litigation-intelligence feed, a new-case monitor for a court or party, a docket-watch tool, or legal-analytics datasets — a free, structured alternative to raw PACER.

Who uses it

Law firms and litigation-intelligence teams, legal-analytics and docket-alert products, corporate legal departments, journalists, and academic legal researchers.

Why this is worth charging for

PACER is expensive and unstructured; CourtListener/RECAP mirrors much of it via a clean API but paginates with cursors and mixes result shapes across search types. This actor normalizes dockets and opinions into a consistent, deduplicated feed you can filter by court, party or nature of suit and monitor on a schedule.

Output

Each dataset item is one normalized record:

{
  "caseName": "Doe v. Acme Corp",
  "court": "cand",
  "docketNumber": "3:24-cv-01234",
  "dateFiled": "2024-04-01",
  "natureOfSuit": "830 Patent",
  "docketId": 65432100,
  "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65432100/doe-v-acme-corp/",
  "source": "CourtListener"
}

Input

Field	Description
apiToken	Optional free token for higher rate limits (Authorization: Token …).
searchType	Which CourtListener index to search.
query	Full-text query, e.g. a party name or keyword.
court	Court identifier, e.g. cand (N.D. Cal.), scotus.
filedAfter	Only cases filed on or after this date.
maxPagesToScan	Cursor pages to follow per run.
onlyNewSinceLastRun	Recommended for schedules — skips records already returned by a previous run using persisted state, so you're only charged for genuinely new items.
maxItems	Stop after this many normalized records.

Pricing (Pay-Per-Event)

• query — $0.02, charged once per run for the API query/poll.
• result-record — $0.02 per normalized record pushed. This is the primary event.
• apify-actor-start (Apify-managed) — covers baseline compute per run.

A new-case monitor for a court or party returns tens of results per run for cents. Add a free CourtListener token to raise rate limits for broad scans.

Source & reliability

Data comes from the official courtlistener.com/api/rest/v4 service; a free token is optional but recommended. No proxies required. Run npm test for the offline self-test covering the normalizer, including edge cases and missing-field handling.

FAQ

Is this a free PACER alternative?

It wraps CourtListener/RECAP, which mirrors a large share of PACER content for free in structured form — ideal for monitoring and analytics.

Can I watch a specific court for new cases?

Yes. Set court and filedAfter (or a party query) and schedule with onlyNewSinceLastRun for new-case alerts.

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