How fast are CourtListener alerts?
CourtListener has two kinds of alerts, search alerts and docket alerts. Both can send alerts within seconds from when data is added to CourtListener.
For popular cases, like those in the news, we get content almost immediately. For other cases, we do not get the content at because the court does not make it freely available, and nobody is adding it to our system. Read our covreage documentation to learn more about how we get data.
Some examples
Faster than Bloomberg
We have it on good authority from Bloomberg reporters that for important cases they use our system because it is faster than anything else they have access to.
Faster than PACER emails
Our @recap.email system receives notification emails directly from PACER and uses them to automatically fetch the relevant data. That data flows into CourtListener, which can then trigger our own alerts to subscribers. Because this pipeline is so fast, if a user subscribes to both our system and PACER's notifications, sometimes our alert emails arrive in a user's inbox before the original PACER notification does.
Sometimes very slow
On the other hand, all of this only works if we have access to the data. Sometimes we don't and alerts don't go out on cases that have valid updates. Review our coverage documentation to learn more about how we get content.
One way to ensure we always get data is to use our RECAP Fetch API, which allows you periodically purchase the content using your PACER account.
mike