Federal court records are public, but accessing them has historically meant paying PACER fees or navigating a slow government portal. RECAP changes that. It is an open-access archive of federal court documents built by the Free Law Project, and CourtListener exposes it all through a clean API.
This is genuinely useful data — and more people need it than you would expect.
Who Uses Federal Court Docket Data
Legal research teams track active litigation against companies, individuals, or in specific practice areas. If you are doing due diligence on a potential hire or acquisition target, federal court history is part of the picture.
Journalists and investigators monitor cases involving public figures, regulatory enforcement actions, or industry-wide litigation trends.
Compliance and risk teams at financial firms and law firms run regular screens against federal case databases to catch litigation exposure early.
Academics studying the legal system need structured case data at scale — case outcomes, judge assignments, filing volumes by district, etc.
Litigation analytics platforms aggregate docket data to help attorneys understand court tendencies and opposing counsel patterns.
What RECAP Contains
RECAP indexes dockets from federal district courts, bankruptcy courts, and appellate courts. Each docket includes:
- Case name, number, and filing date
- Court and assigned judge
- Docket entries (filings, orders, hearings)
- Party names and attorneys of record
- Case status and disposition
Not every case is in RECAP — it depends on what has been contributed by users — but coverage is substantial and growing.
Accessing RECAP via Apify
The RECAP Federal Court Dockets actor queries the CourtListener API and returns structured docket records. You can search by case name, party name, court, or date range.
{
"query": "SEC v. Ripple",
"court": "nysd",
"maxResults": 20
}
Output includes docket metadata and entry summaries in clean JSON — easy to pipe into a spreadsheet, database, or downstream analysis pipeline.
Practical Uses
A few real workflows this enables:
- Vendor risk screening: before signing a major contract, run a quick search against the vendor name to surface active federal litigation
- Competitive monitoring: watch for regulatory enforcement actions against competitors
- Portfolio monitoring: law firms tracking all active matters involving a key client
Federal court data is public record. RECAP makes it accessible. This actor makes it programmatic.
Ava Torres is a data engineer in SF building automation tools for research and compliance workflows.
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