A lawsuit finder is a tool for locating court case records, and the right one depends on whether the case is federal or state, how recent it is, and whether you need just the docket or extras like alerts and analytics. For federal cases, start with PACER or a free mirror like CourtListener. For state cases, go directly to that state’s court portal. Paid platforms exist for people who need to search across many jurisdictions at once or want analytics on top of the raw records.
Finding Federal Cases Through PACER
PACER, short for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is run by the federal judiciary and covers every U.S. appellate, district, and bankruptcy court. It is available around the clock, including weekends and holidays.1PACER. Find a Case Each court keeps its own records, but the PACER Case Locator searches a nationwide index updated daily, which helps when you don’t know where a case was filed.2PACER. Search the National Index
You need an account to use PACER. The system charges ten cents per page, capped at $3.00 for any single document, and $2.40 per audio file. If your charges stay at $30 or less in a calendar quarter, the fees are waived, so casual users often pay nothing.3PACER. PACER Pricing: How Fees Work Court opinions are always free, and parties to a case get one free electronic copy of each document filed through the court’s electronic notification system.4United States Courts. Electronic Public Access Fee Schedule Courts can also grant discretionary fee waivers to indigent litigants, pro bono attorneys, and academic researchers for non-commercial use.
What you can search for depends on the court. District courts let you search by case number, party name, or filing date range. Bankruptcy searches add Social Security number and tax ID. Appellate court searches are limited to case number or party name.5PACER. Find a Case – Additional Details Documents come as PDFs or HTML files. Some information is redacted by default, including Social Security numbers, financial account numbers, the names of minors, and home addresses in criminal cases.
Free Alternatives for Federal Cases
Several free resources can substitute for PACER or fill in around it.
CourtListener and the RECAP Archive. Operated by the nonprofit Free Law Project, CourtListener holds more than 10 million legal opinions and roughly 17 million PACER documents.6CourtListener. Frequently Asked Questions The archive is crowdsourced: anyone who installs the free RECAP browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari automatically contributes documents they purchase on PACER, making them free for everyone else.7Free Law Project. RECAP You can run advanced keyword searches with filters for jurisdiction, judge, party, and attorney.8Stanford Law Library. Free Docket Resources The catch: the archive contains only what users have purchased and contributed, so a document nobody has pulled won’t be there.
Google Scholar. Google added case law search in 2009. It covers all U.S. Supreme Court opinions back to 1791, other federal court opinions since 1923, and state appellate and supreme court opinions since 1950.9Clio. Google Scholar Case Law A “How Cited” feature shows which later opinions referenced a given case. It has no true citator, so it won’t tell you whether a case has been overruled, and it doesn’t carry docket sheets or filings.10Library of Congress. Google Scholar
Justia. Offers free Supreme Court opinions from 1791, federal appellate decisions from 1951, and varying coverage of district court decisions and dockets, some going back to 2004.11George Mason University Law Library. Free Legal Research Resources It also covers state case law. There are no editorial tools like headnotes or citators.12Library of Congress. Justia
No free database contains every federal case. When a document isn’t available electronically anywhere, the UCLA Law Library’s advice is to contact the court directly.13UCLA Law Library. Federal Dockets
Finding State Court Cases
There is no national system for state courts. Each state runs its own portal, and coverage varies in which case types are available, how far back records go, and what search fields are supported.
Pennsylvania’s Unified Judicial System Web Portal supports searches by docket number, participant name, date of birth, county, case type, and case status.14Pennsylvania Courts. Case Search New York’s eCourts system splits access across sub-portals for local civil, supreme civil, criminal, and family cases, each with different search fields. WebCivil Supreme supports index number, party name, attorney, and keyword searches, while WebCriminal only shows pending cases.15Fordham Law Library. New York State Dockets Massachusetts puts trial court dockets on MassCourts.org, with appellate dockets on a separate portal.16Massachusetts Courts. Search Court Dockets, Calendars and Case Information Illinois has moved toward statewide e-filing through eFileIL, with a document repository called re:SearchIL expanding public access under a Supreme Court remote access policy.17Illinois Courts. eFileIL Michigan’s MiFILE covers the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, Court of Claims, and trial courts, though trial and appellate systems operate separately.18Michigan Courts. MiFILE Systems
As a general rule, appellate records are more accessible online than trial records, and newer cases are easier to find than older ones. When records aren’t online, contact the clerk of court’s office.19Brooklyn Law School Library. Finding Dockets and Court Records
When a Paid Platform Is Worth It
Commercial platforms aggregate records across jurisdictions and add search tools, analytics, and alerts. They are built for attorneys, corporate legal teams, insurers, and compliance professionals, not casual users looking up a single case.
LexisNexis CourtLink provides access to over 322 million federal and state court dockets, covering all federal courts and most state trial courts, with roughly 100,000 new dockets added weekly. It runs on flat-rate subscriptions with no per-page fees, and LexisNexis does not publish prices.20LexisNexis. CourtLink Bloomberg Law covers all federal courts and more than 1,000 state courts, also on a flat subscription.21Bloomberg Law. Court Dockets Search
UniCourt claims coverage of more than 4,000 state and federal courts across over 40 states, with over 140 million cases and 3 billion docket entries. It is API-first and popular with legal tech companies; individual plans start at $49 per month, with professional and premium tiers at $149 and $299.22Datarade. UniCourt Data Provider Profile23PacerMonitor. PacerMonitor Pricing24vLex. Docket Alarm25SoftwareFinder. Docket Alarm Trellis specializes in state trial court civil litigation and is best known for a judge analytics dashboard with motion grant rates, average case length, and disposition timing by practice area.26Trellis. Judge Analytics
What You Won’t Find
U.S. court records are presumptively public, but entire categories are kept out of public view.27Federal Judicial Center. Sealed Records and Proceedings In federal courts, sealed or restricted material typically includes unexecuted warrants, presentence reports, juvenile records, juror identifying information, and documents containing classified information or trade secrets. Transcripts may be sealed to protect cooperating witnesses. Discovery materials that were never filed with the court aren’t public at all.28United States Courts. A Journalist’s Guide to Federal Courts
State restrictions vary. Indiana, for example, excludes mental health proceedings, juvenile and child welfare cases, and certain paternity records from public access, along with specific items like medical reports, substance abuse treatment records, guardian ad litem reports, and the names of child witnesses in sex offense cases.29Indiana Courts. Indiana Rules for Access to Court Records
Older files are a separate problem. Most federal cases opened before 1999 exist only on paper and must be requested from the court where they were filed or from a Federal Records Center run by the National Archives. Retrieving a document from a Federal Records Center costs $64.30United States Courts. Find a Case – PACER For closed cases, the National Archives accepts requests for bankruptcy, civil, criminal, and appellate files through its order forms.31National Archives. Order Copies of Court Records
Fee Reform and Free Alerts
PACER’s fees have been contested for years. The system collects more than $150 million annually, and critics argue that revenue meant to cover the cost of providing records has gone to unrelated court technology projects.32Electronic Frontier Foundation. Court Records Should Be Free A class action filed in 2016 by the National Veterans Legal Services Program, the National Consumer Law Center, and the Alliance for Justice alleged that PACER charged fees exceeding what the law allows. In March 2024, a federal judge approved a $125 million settlement, with $100 million set aside for distribution to eligible PACER account holders.33Courthouse News Service. $125 Million Settlement Approved in Class Action Over Excessive PACER Fees
In Congress, Senators John Kennedy and Ron Wyden introduced the Open Courts Act of 2026 (S.4667) in June 2026. It would eliminate PACER fees for public access, replace PACER and the current electronic filing system with a unified platform, and require search, bulk access, and API functions in machine-readable formats.34United States Congress. Open Courts Act of 2026, S.4667 Funding would shift to fees on high-volume commercial users and a standard annual assessment on federal agencies.35ABA Journal. Senators Trying to Increase Access to Federal Court Records The bill was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2026. A similar measure previously got bipartisan committee support but was never enacted.32Electronic Frontier Foundation. Court Records Should Be Free
In June 2025, CourtListener launched RECAP Search Alerts, which let users monitor federal filings by keyword using Boolean search and jurisdiction filters. Free accounts get five daily alerts; paid tiers start at $10 per month for extra capacity and real-time notifications.36LawNext. CourtListener Launches RECAP Search Alerts for PACER Filings For anyone tracking a case without a PACER budget, that is currently the closest thing to a free federal-court alert service.