Court Records Scraper — Case Law, Dockets, Judges & Litigation Monitor

Extract US court records straight from CourtListener (the Free Law Project) — case-law opinions, federal PACER/RECAP dockets (with parties, attorneys & law firms), judges & judicial profiles, oral-argument audio and federal judge financial disclosures — all in one actor.

No login, no PACER fees, no scraping headaches — fast, structured JSON from an official legal-data source. Most data needs no API key at all; an optional free token only adds full opinion text and docket filing entries.

Why this court records scraper?

Most legal scrapers do one thing — dump opinions and stop. This actor ships the richest dataset in the category: case law and live litigation dockets and judges and oral arguments and financial disclosures, each with a relevance/lead score, plus a monitor mode that returns only new records since your last run.

Data	Typical scrapers	This actor
Case-law opinions (citations, cite count, precedential status, judges, excerpt)	✅	✅
Federal dockets with parties, attorneys & law firms (legal leads)	❌	✅
Nature of suit, cause, jury demand, assigned & referred judges	❌	✅
Judges — bio, courts served, positions, appointers, ABA ratings, education	❌	✅
Oral-argument audio (date, duration, download URL)	partial	✅
Federal judge financial disclosures	❌	✅
Relevance / lead score (0–100) on every record	❌	✅
Monitor mode — only new cases, dockets or filings since last run	❌	✅
Works with no API key	partial	✅
No start fee	—	✅

Use cases

• Litigation monitoring & alerts — watch a company, party, attorney, court or keyword and get only new dockets and opinions each day (monitor mode + a Schedule).
• Legal lead generation — pull attorneys of record and law firms from active dockets for legal marketing, expert-witness outreach, litigation finance and e-discovery sales.
• Case-law research & analytics — build datasets of opinions by court, judge, topic, date or citation count; surface the most-cited, highest-impact decisions.
• Competitive & docket intelligence — track a competitor's lawsuits, patent disputes, bankruptcies (chapter) and regulatory litigation.
• Judicial analytics — analyze judges by appointer, tenure, courts served, ABA rating, education and political affiliation.
• Compliance, journalism & watchdog research — follow federal judge financial disclosures, party relationships and high-profile case activity.

How to use

1. Sign up for Apify — the free plan is enough to try this actor.
2. Pick a mode (case law, dockets, judges, oral arguments or financial disclosures) and set your filters (query, court, judge, party, dates…).
3. (Optional) Paste a free CourtListener token into courtListenerToken for full opinion text, docket filing entries and higher rate limits — get it at your CourtListener profile → Profile → API. It is not required.
4. Click Start, watch results stream into the dataset, then export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS — or pull them via the Apify API.

Input

{
    "mode": "dockets",
    "partyName": "Apple",
    "court": "cand",
    "natureOfSuit": "Patent",
    "orderBy": "newest",
    "maxResults": 200,
    "monitorMode": false
}

• mode (required) — what to scrape:
  • caseLaw — court opinions & decisions (case-law research).
  • dockets — federal PACER/RECAP litigation with parties, attorneys & firms (the litigation-intelligence + legal-lead mode).
  • judges — judicial profiles & biographies.
  • oralArguments — oral-argument audio records.
  • financialDisclosures — federal judge financial-disclosure filings.
• searchQuery — full-text query (case names & text; judge name in judges mode).
• court — restrict to one court by ID, e.g. scotus, ca9, cand, nysd. Court list.
• judge — opinions authored by / dockets assigned to this judge.
• partyName / attorneyName / natureOfSuit — dockets filters.
• precedentialStatus — case law: published (precedential) or unpublished.
• minCitations — case law: only opinions cited at least N times (high-impact filter).
• dateFrom / dateTo — filed date (case law/dockets) or argued date (oral arguments).
• orderBy — relevance, newest, oldest or mostCited.
• year / personId — financial-disclosure filters (year, or one judge by person ID).
• startUrls — paste CourtListener /person/, /audio/, /docket/ or /opinion/ URLs to scrape directly.
• courtListenerToken (optional) — free token for full text, docket entries & higher limits.
• includeFullText (case law, needs token) — fetch complete opinion text.
• includeDocketEntries (dockets, needs token) — fetch recent filing entries.
• includeJudgeDetails (default true) — judges: add positions, education & affiliations.
• maxResults (default 100) — cap per run.
• monitorMode (default false) — remember prior runs and emit only new records.

Output

Every record carries a type field plus a normalized common set (name, date, court, url, leadScore) and full source-faithful fields for that type.

A docket (litigation) record — note the attorney & firm leads:

{
    "type": "docket",
    "docketId": 68889442,
    "caseName": "Epic Games, Inc. v. Apple Inc.",
    "court": "United States District Court, N.D. California",
    "courtId": "cand",
    "docketNumber": "4:20-cv-05640",
    "pacerCaseId": "364265",
    "dateFiled": "2020-08-13",
    "dateTerminated": null,
    "assignedJudge": "Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers",
    "natureOfSuit": "Other Contract",
    "cause": "15:1 Antitrust Litigation",
    "juryDemand": "Both",
    "parties": ["Epic Games, Inc.", "Apple Inc."],
    "partyCount": 2,
    "attorneys": ["Gary A. Bornstein", "Christine A. Varney"],
    "attorneyCount": 2,
    "firms": ["Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP"],
    "firmCount": 1,
    "isActive": true,
    "leadScore": 90,
    "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68889442/epic-games-inc-v-apple-inc/"
}

A case-law opinion record:

{
    "type": "opinion",
    "clusterId": 112332,
    "caseName": "Riley v. California",
    "court": "Supreme Court of the United States",
    "courtId": "scotus",
    "dateFiled": "2014-06-25",
    "citations": ["573 U.S. 373"],
    "citationCount": 4821,
    "precedentialStatus": "Published",
    "judge": "Roberts",
    "excerpt": "We granted certiorari to decide whether the police may, without a warrant, search digital information on a cell phone…",
    "leadScore": 95,
    "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/112332/riley-v-california/"
}

A judge record:

{
    "type": "judge",
    "personId": 1212,
    "name": "Douglas Howard Ginsburg",
    "courtsServed": ["cadc"],
    "abaRatings": ["Qualified"],
    "appointers": ["Ronald Reagan"],
    "schools": ["University of Chicago Law School"],
    "positions": [
        { "court": "U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit", "title": "Judge", "dateStart": "1986-11-14", "dateTermination": null }
    ],
    "leadScore": 90,
    "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/person/1212/douglas-howard-ginsburg/"
}

A financial disclosure record:

{
    "type": "financialDisclosure",
    "disclosureId": 4821,
    "personId": 1212,
    "judgeName": "Douglas Howard Ginsburg",
    "year": 2022,
    "pageCount": 7,
    "sections": { "investments": 41, "gifts": 2, "debts": null, "positions": 3 },
    "downloadUrl": "https://…/disclosure.pdf",
    "leadScore": 75,
    "url": "https://www.courtlistener.com/person/1212/douglas-howard-ginsburg/"
}

Automate & schedule

Run this actor on autopilot and pull results into your own stack:

• Apify API — start runs, fetch datasets and manage schedules over REST.
• apify-client for JavaScript and apify-client for Python — official SDKs.
• Schedules — run it daily/weekly to track new dockets, opinions or filings for a court, judge, party or keyword.
• Webhooks — trigger downstream actions (CRM import, Slack alert, docket alert) the moment a run finishes.

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'MY_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('scrapesage/court-records-scraper').call({
    mode: 'dockets',
    partyName: 'Apple',
    natureOfSuit: 'Patent',
    maxResults: 300,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Got ${items.length} docket records`);

Integrate with any app

Connect the dataset to 5,000+ apps — no code required:

• Make — multi-step automation scenarios.
• Zapier — push new dockets or attorney leads straight into your CRM.
• Slack — get notified when a monitored search finds new cases.
• Google Drive / Sheets — auto-export every run to a spreadsheet.
• Airbyte — pipe results into your data warehouse.
• GitHub — trigger runs from commits or releases.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

The output is clean, LLM-ready JSON. Call this actor from Claude, ChatGPT or any agent framework through the Apify MCP server — ask your assistant to "find new patent dockets against Apple in the Northern District of California" or "list the most-cited Supreme Court privacy decisions since 2018" and let it run this scraper.

More scrapers from scrapesage

Build a complete public-records, legal & B2B intelligence stack:

• FindLaw Scraper — lawyers, law firms & attorney leads (pairs with docket attorneys-of-record).
• SEC EDGAR Scraper — company filings, financials & insiders.
• FEC Campaign Finance Scraper — donors, PACs & lobbying.
• USAspending Scraper — federal awards & contractors.
• SAM.gov Scraper — federal contract opportunities & contacts.
• Companies House Scraper — UK companies, directors & PSCs.
• Google Patents Scraper — patents, citations & assignees.

Tips

• Litigation alerts: set mode: dockets, add a partyName, attorneyName or court, turn on monitorMode, and add a daily Schedule — you'll only ever see new cases.
• High-impact case law: use minCitations (e.g. 50) with orderBy: mostCited to surface the decisions courts actually rely on.
• Legal leads: dockets mode returns attorneys and firms per case — filter by leadScore to prioritize active cases with named counsel.
• Go deep: add a free courtListenerToken and enable includeFullText / includeDocketEntries for complete opinions and filing histories.
• Find a judge's ID: run judges mode, grab the personId, then use it in financialDisclosures mode.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. Case law, dockets, judges and financial disclosures all work on the keyless public API. A free CourtListener token only adds full opinion text, docket filing entries and higher rate limits.

Where does the data come from? The official CourtListener REST API operated by the non-profit Free Law Project, including the RECAP archive of federal PACER documents. All data is public record.

How current is it? CourtListener ingests opinions and PACER/RECAP dockets continuously, so newly filed cases and decisions appear quickly. Use orderBy: newest plus monitorMode to track them.

Can I export to Google Sheets, CSV or Excel? Yes — one click in the dataset view, or automatically on every run via the Google Drive integration.

Why is a field null? Some records genuinely don't include every field (e.g. a docket with no listed attorneys, an opinion with no neutral citation). Fields are null only when the source doesn't provide the value.

How does monitor mode work with Schedules? It uses a named key-value store to remember what it has already returned and emits only new records each run. It is independent of Apify Schedules, so the two never conflict — schedule the run, and monitor mode handles deduplication.

Is this legal? This actor collects publicly available legal records only. You are responsible for using the data in compliance with applicable laws and CourtListener's terms.

Need help?

Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab, or visit the Apify help center. Feature requests are welcome — this actor is actively maintained.