Federal Cases and Filings
The RECAP Archive is the biggest open collection of federal court data on the Internet.
It contains hundreds of millions of docket entries, every unsealed federal case, and millions of documents. On a given day, it is likely to gain numerous new dockets, thousands of new documents, and around 100,000 new docket entries.
Our goal with the is to collect any PACER data that we can so that we can share it as widely as possible. Help us realize this goal by installing the RECAP extension or setting up @recap.email.
Data Sources
There is no easy answer to "What's in RECAP?," but we can share how we get content from PACER and provide details about data gathering projects we have completed.
RECAP Extension
An important source of PACER data in CourtListener is the RECAP Extension.
The RECAP Extension is a tool for your browser that is used by around 30,000 people. As you use PACER, the extension will send copies of your purchases to the RECAP Archive.
RECAP is used by many journalists. As a result, the documents contributed by the extensions are some of the most newsworthy in the country. If you use PACER, install the RECAP Extension to save money and contribute to the public commons.
@recap.email system
People that receive ECF notification emails from PACER can use the @recap.email system to seamlessly add documents to the RECAP Archive.
Each time they get a notification from PACER, we get it too.
Special Case Scrapers
CourtListener automatically identifies certain cases as "special." These cases get additional monitoring via scrapers that regularly gather data from PACER. Examples of special cases are those that have active Docket Alerts, are saved in Notes, or are otherwise popular or important.
Learn About Docket Alerts Learn About Notes
PACER Fetch APIs
We host free APIs that many organizations use to gather cases and documents from PACER. Every day, many organizations rely on these automated tools to add data to our system.
Client Work
CourtListener is an initiative of [Free Law Project][11], a non-profit that consults with organizations to gather PACER data. In these arrangements, we purchase thousands of items from PACER, which we add to the RECAP Archive.
Details about the datasets we've built so far are listed on our page about special datasets.
PACER Opinion Scraper
When clerks upload documents to PACER, they mark items as official opinions or orders of the court. Such documents are then free to download from PACER. Each night we download all documents that clerks mark in this way from district and bankruptcy courts across the country.
PACER RSS Feeds
Most federal district courts provide RSS feeds listing their latest docket entries. We crawl these feeds on an ongoing basis to get the latest docket entries.
For details on which courts have enabled RSS feeds, see the documentation on alerts.
Basic PACER Content Scraper
Basic case metadata is freely available on PACER for all District and Bankruptcy cases. This includes details such as the case name, docket number, date filed, date of last filing, and date terminated.
For bankruptcy cases, additional information is available, including the assigned judge, bankruptcy chapter, date the plan was confirmed, and date the debtor was discharged.
We regularly scrape these pages for each court, ensuring that we collect basic metadata for all new District and Bankruptcy cases shortly after they are filed. This data can be used to trigger RECAP Search Alerts.
Social Media Bots
We host a fleet of social media bots that download important documents from PACER so they can be shared with the public. The bots use CourtListener APIs to download content from PACER. As a result, anything the bots buy is automatically contributed to the RECAP Archive.
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