UK Case Law Search and Monitor

Search and monitor UK court judgments and tribunal decisions from the National Archives Find Case Law service: case name, neutral citation, court, judge, dates, links and optional full text. No account needed.

🔍 What does UK Case Law Search and Monitor do?

It runs a search against Find Case Law and returns every judgment it finds as a clean row of data, ready for a spreadsheet, a database or your own product.

• Searches across all UK courts and tribunals: Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court (all divisions), Upper Tribunals, Employment Appeal Tribunal, First-tier Tribunals
• Returns structured metadata: case name, neutral citation, date, court, party names, links to HTML, PDF and XML versions
• Optionally fetches the full text of each judgment for document analysis, AI processing, or legal research
• Supports change monitoring via content hashes, run on a schedule to detect when judgments are updated or new ones published
• Paginates automatically through large result sets

Data is licensed under the Open Justice Licence, and commercial use is permitted.

📊 What data can I extract from Find Case Law?

One row per judgment:

Field	Description
title	Case name, for example "Smith v Jones"
neutralCitation	Official citation, for example "[2024] EWCA Civ 123"
fclIdentifier	Find Case Law internal ID
documentUri	Stable machine-readable URI
dateHandedDown	Date judgment was handed down (YYYY-MM-DD)
dateUpdated	Date last updated in the Find Case Law system
court	Court or tribunal name
contentHash	SHA256 hash of judgment text, for change detection
urlHtml	Link to the human-readable judgment page
urlXml	Link to structured LegalDocML XML
urlPdf	Link to the PDF version
identifiers	All identifiers, neutral citation plus FCL ID
fullText	Full judgment text, only when "Include full text" is enabled

💡 Why scrape UK case law?

Practice area monitoring. Alert on new Employment Tribunal or High Court judgments matching your keywords, on a schedule.

Legal tech and AI. Bulk extract structured judgment text for LLM fine-tuning, legal RAG pipelines or case analysis tools.

Compliance and regulatory tracking. Follow judicial review of government decisions, competition rulings and Upper Tribunal (Tax) decisions affecting your sector.

Academic research. Build structured datasets of judgments by court, year or topic for empirical legal studies.

🚀 How do I use UK Case Law Search and Monitor?

1. Click Try for free.
2. Enter a keyword in query, wrapping phrases in double quotes for an exact match.
3. Narrow it with court, party, judge or a dateFrom and dateTo range.
4. Set maxResults to cap the run, and turn on includeFullText if you need the judgment text.
5. Click Start, then download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull them from the API.

⬇️ Input

{
  "query": "\"unfair dismissal\"",
  "court": "eat",
  "dateFrom": "2024-01-01",
  "maxResults": 50
}

Field	Type	Default	What it does
query	string		Full-text keyword search, wrap phrases in double quotes for exact match
court	string	all courts	Court code to filter by, see the table below
party	string		Filter by party name, partial names work
judge	string		Filter by judge name, partial names work
dateFrom	string		Only judgments handed down on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
dateTo	string		Only judgments handed down on or before this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
maxResults	integer	50	Maximum number of judgments to return, up to 500
includeFullText	boolean	false	Fetch the full judgment text for each result, slower
orderBy	string	-date	Sort order: -date newest first, date oldest first, -updated or updated by last amendment

⬆️ Output

Table view

Results arrive as a Judgments table you can sort and filter in the Console, with the case name, citation, court and dates lined up for scanning.

JSON

A typical row:

{
  "title": "MUF, R (on the application of) v The Secretary of State for Defence",
  "court": "High Court (Administrative Court)",
  "neutralCitation": "[2026] EWHC 2108 (Admin)",
  "dateHandedDown": "2026-08-07",
  "dateUpdated": "2026-08-07",
  "fclIdentifier": "xhxv8gx6",
  "documentUri": "d-6a6be1b5-9d65-4629-a11b-b03c021f47cd",
  "contentHash": "b67c28468dfb86b159c7ed69e2b92236a50cf882b0803b1cc691319ead8f10d4",
  "urlHtml": "https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/admin/2026/2108",
  "urlXml": "https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/admin/2026/2108/data.xml",
  "urlPdf": "https://assets.caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/d-6a6be1b5-9d65-4629-a11b-b03c021f47cd/d-6a6be1b5-9d65-4629-a11b-b03c021f47cd.pdf",
  "fullText": null
}

Download it from the run as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it straight from the API.

Courts available

Code	Court
uksc	UK Supreme Court
ukpc	Privy Council
ewca/civ	Court of Appeal (Civil)
ewca/crim	Court of Appeal (Criminal)
ewhc/kb	High Court (King's Bench)
ewhc/ch	High Court (Chancery)
ewhc/fam	High Court (Family)
ewhc/comm	High Court (Commercial)
ewhc/pat	High Court (Patents)
ewhc/tcc	High Court (Technology and Construction)
ewhc/admin	High Court (Administrative)
eat	Employment Appeal Tribunal
ukut/iac	Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum)
ukut/tax	Upper Tribunal (Tax and Chancery)
ukut/lc	Upper Tribunal (Lands Chamber)
ukftt/tc	First-tier Tribunal (Tax)
ukftt/grc	First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory)

Scheduling and monitoring

This actor works well on a schedule. To monitor for new judgments in a specific area:

1. Set a keyword query, for example "unfair dismissal", and a court, for example eat
2. Set orderBy to Newest first
3. Set maxResults to 10 to 20
4. Schedule it to run daily or weekly via Apify's scheduler

Use the contentHash field to detect when existing judgments are amended.

Rate limits and performance

The National Archives API allows up to 1,000 requests per rolling 5-minute window per IP. This actor automatically respects this limit with built-in throttling and exponential backoff on errors.

Typical run times:

• 50 results, metadata only: around 30 seconds
• 50 results, with full text: 3 to 5 minutes
• 500 results, metadata only: around 5 minutes

💰 How much does it cost?

Right now this Actor rents at $25 a month, which covers as many runs and as many judgments as you need.

From 21 August 2026 it moves to pay per result at $0.02 per judgment. Most people run this occasionally rather than continuously, so the change makes it markedly cheaper for them, and you only pay for what a run actually returns. Set maxResults to cap what a run can cost. Turning on includeFullText makes a run slower but does not change the charge, since you are still charged once per judgment.

Runs that return nothing cost nothing under the new pricing.

🔌 Integrations

Send results straight to Google Sheets, Slack, Airtable, Zapier, Make or your own webhook using Apify integrations. You can also trigger a run whenever something happens in another tool.

🔗 Using UK Case Law Search and Monitor with the Apify API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/spookyweb~uk-case-law-search-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "\"unfair dismissal\"", "court": "eat", "dateFrom": "2024-01-01", "maxResults": 50}'

Or with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('spookyweb/uk-case-law-search-monitor').call({
  query: '"unfair dismissal"',
  court: 'eat',
  dateFrom: '2024-01-01',
  maxResults: 50,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Full detail is in the Apify API reference, and every run is also callable from the Python and JavaScript clients.

❓ FAQ

Is there an official Find Case Law API?

Yes. Find Case Law publishes an API, but it answers in Akoma Ntoso LegalDocML, an XML format you have to parse and flatten before it is any use. This Actor talks to that API for you and hands back flat rows with the citation, court, dates and links already extracted.

How far back does coverage go?

Coverage is exactly whatever Find Case Law publishes. It holds the modern judgment record for the courts and tribunals listed above, and the National Archives keeps adding older material. If a judgment is on Find Case Law this Actor will find it. Use dateFrom and dateTo to bound a search.

Can I monitor for new judgments on a topic?

Yes, that is what the scheduling section above is for. Set a query and a court, sort newest first, keep maxResults low and schedule it daily. The contentHash field also tells you when a judgment you already have has been amended.

What is a neutral citation?

It is the court's own citation for a judgment, independent of any law report, for example [2024] EWCA Civ 123. It identifies the court, the year and the judgment number, and it is the reliable key for joining this data to anything else.

Can I get the full text of a judgment?

Yes, set includeFullText to true and the fullText field is populated for every result. It is slower because each judgment is fetched individually, so leave it off when you only need metadata.

Can I use the data commercially?

Yes. Find Case Law data is published under the Open Justice Licence v1.0, which permits copying, distribution, transmission and commercial use subject to attribution. Attribution statement: Contains information licensed under the Open Justice Licence v1.0.

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape UK case law?

Judgments are public documents published by the National Archives Find Case Law service. Open justice means court judgments are published deliberately for anyone to read. This reads only that public service, and it never logs in.

Judgments name parties because the court published them that way, so treat any onward use of names under GDPR as your responsibility. Apify's ethical scraping guide covers the wider picture.

👍 Your feedback

Found a bug, or want a field that is not here yet? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab. Requests that make the data more useful get built, and problems get fixed quickly.

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