To do a lawsuit lookup, start with the court the case was filed in: federal cases live on PACER (with free mirrors on CourtListener), and state cases live on each state’s or county’s court records portal. In both systems you can search by party name or case number, pull up the docket, and in most courts view the filed documents themselves. The rest is knowing which portal applies, what it costs, and what won’t show up.
Federal Cases: PACER and Its Free Mirrors
Federal lawsuits (district court, appellate, and bankruptcy) are indexed in PACER, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, which holds over a billion documents from every federal court.1PACER. Public Access to Court Electronic Records You can search a single court’s system, which updates in real time, or use the PACER Case Locator for a nationwide index that refreshes nightly.2PACER. Find a Case
A PACER account is free to register. Viewing documents costs ten cents per page, capped at three dollars per document, and if your total charges in a calendar quarter stay at or below thirty dollars, the fees are waived. For most casual lookups, that means PACER is effectively free. You can also view records at no charge on public terminals inside any federal courthouse.3U.S. Courts. Find a Case – PACER
Two limits worth knowing before you start. PACER is not full-text searchable: you can find a case by party name or case number, but not by searching the words inside the filings.4Yale Law Library. Locating Court Records, Briefs, and Oral Arguments And cases opened before roughly 1999 are generally paper-only, which means contacting the court clerk, a Federal Records Center, or the National Archives.3U.S. Courts. Find a Case – PACER
Free Alternatives to PACER
CourtListener, run by the nonprofit Free Law Project, hosts the RECAP Archive: hundreds of millions of docket entries covering nearly every federal case, with millions of actual documents available for free. The archive grows by roughly 100,000 docket entries a day, fed by about 30,000 users who run a browser extension that uploads documents they purchase on PACER.5Free Law Project. RECAP Archive Coverage CourtListener also holds over nine million judicial decisions.6Free Law Project. CourtListener Coverage If you’re looking up a federal case, check CourtListener first; the document you want may already be there.
For published opinions specifically, GovInfo (from the U.S. Government Publishing Office) hosts text-searchable opinions from many federal courts issued after April 2004.2PACER. Find a Case Google Scholar is another free entry point and includes every U.S. Supreme Court opinion since 1791, other federal opinions since 1923, and state appellate and supreme court opinions since the 1950s.7Library of Congress. Google Scholar for Case Law It works well for pulling up a known case, but it can’t tell you whether a ruling is still good law, so treat it as a starting point.8Maryland Courts. Using Google for Case Law Research
State and County Cases
State courts handle most American litigation: civil disputes, criminal prosecutions, family law, probate. Every state runs its own records, and online access ranges from a single statewide portal to a patchwork of county websites. There is no national equivalent of PACER for state cases.
States With Statewide Portals
Texas uses re:SearchTX for civil cases in district, county, and probate courts. A free basic account searches across all 254 counties; viewing full documents may cost one dollar for the first ten pages and ten cents per page after. The system generally has electronically filed data from 2016 forward, and all Texas courts are required to be integrated by November 2025.9re:SearchTX. re:SearchTX FAQ Texas appellate cases are searchable for free through TAMES.10Texas State Law Library. Texas Court Records
Minnesota Court Records Online covers all counties and lets you search by name, case number, citation number, or attorney, filtered by case category and status.11Minnesota Judicial Branch. Minnesota Court Records Online Indiana’s mycase.in.gov provides free access to trial and appellate records, with many documents available at no cost.12Indiana Judicial Branch. Public Records New York offers eCourts, with separate portals for civil, criminal, family, and surrogate cases, plus NYSCEF for electronic filings.13New York State Courts. eCourts Virginia runs separate portals for circuit, general district, and juvenile and domestic relations courts.14Virginia Courts. Case Information
States and Counties Without a Single Portal
Florida is the clearest example of a decentralized system. Each county’s independently elected Clerk of the Circuit Court manages its own records, and there is no statewide case search. The Florida Court Clerks and Comptrollers website links out to each county’s portal, and MyFloridaCounty.com offers a statewide official records search.15Florida Court Clerks and Comptrollers. Florida Court Clerks and Comptrollers Florida appellate cases have their own statewide Appellate Case Information System.16Florida Courts. Florida Courts
In California, the Los Angeles Superior Court covers felonies online from 1980 and misdemeanors generally from 1988. Searching by case number is free. Name searches cost $4.75 each, charged whether or not anything comes back, and document downloads run one dollar per page for the first five and forty cents after, capped at forty dollars per document.17Los Angeles Superior Court. Online Services FAQ Cook County, Illinois offers a free online case lookup with brief summaries, though data may lag a few days and isn’t considered the official record.18Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County. Online Case Information
When you don’t know which portal to use, the fastest shortcut is to search the county name plus “court record search.” That almost always surfaces the correct site.19UCLA Law Library. State Court Dockets
What You’ll See in a Record
A standard court record lookup will typically show:
- The docket sheet, which lists every filing and event in chronological order.
- The parties and their attorneys.
- The actual filings and documents, often as PDFs: complaints, motions, briefs, exhibits.
- Court orders and judgments, including the final disposition.
- Case status: active, inactive, or closed.
Federal courts require redaction of Social Security numbers, taxpayer IDs, dates of birth, minor children’s names, financial account numbers, and (in criminal cases) home addresses from public filings. And a boundary worth stating directly: discovery materials that were never filed with the court, such as depositions, interrogatory answers, and confidential settlement terms, generally stay private and will not appear in any public search.20U.S. Courts. Accessing Court Documents – A Journalist’s Guide
What You Won’t Find: Sealed and Restricted Records
Not every case is searchable. Sealed records are closed to public view, either by statute or by a judge’s order, and sealing practices vary by state; some allow sealed records to be hidden but recoverable in later litigation, others permit outright destruction or expungement.21Cornell Law Institute. Sealing of Records
The most commonly restricted categories:
- Juvenile delinquency and dependency cases, confidential in most states.
- Family law and cases involving minors. In California, for example, remote access to divorce, child custody, and civil harassment cases is generally limited to registers of action and calendars; full records must be viewed in person.22California Courts. Viewing Courts’ Electronic Case Records
- Expunged or sealed criminal records. In Texas, criminal history can be removed from public view through expunctions or sealed via orders of nondisclosure.10Texas State Law Library. Texas Court Records
- National security material, trade secrets, and documents tied to ongoing criminal investigations. Federal judges can seal documents or close hearings in these situations.20U.S. Courts. Accessing Court Documents – A Journalist’s Guide
The federal standard for sealing is high. The First Amendment requires a party to show that secrecy is essential to preserve a higher value, that there is a high probability disclosure would harm an overriding interest, and that no less restrictive alternative exists.23Public Justice. When It Comes to Sealing Court Records, the Presumption of Public Access Requires Just Say No In practice, sealing is often granted without that showing. One analysis found that in 85% of cases where health and safety information was under seal, judges gave no stated reason for the decision.24Knight First Amendment Institute. Judicial Secrecy: How to Fix the Over-Sealing of Federal Court Records
Looking Up Class Actions and Settlements
If you’re searching because you think you might be part of a class action, use a database built for that purpose rather than PACER. The Consumer Action Class Action Database lets you search cases that are open to claims, pending, or closed, with a calendar of upcoming claim deadlines.25Consumer Action. Class Action Database ClassAction.org keeps a free, daily-updated list of proposed class actions in federal court, plus separate lists of open settlements and active lawsuits.26ClassAction.org. Class Action Database For multistate enforcement actions brought by state attorneys general, the National Association of Attorneys General runs a Multistate Settlements Database covering actions from the early 1980s to the present, searchable by topic, state, company, or keyword.27NAAG. Multistate Settlements Database
Paid Aggregators (for Regular Users)
If you’re searching courts routinely rather than looking up one case, a commercial platform may be worth the cost. LexisNexis CourtLink provides access to over 322 million federal and state dockets with natural-language search and litigation analytics.28LexisNexis. CourtLink Westlaw covers all U.S. district courts and many state courts, with some coverage going back to the 1970s.29Thomson Reuters. Westlaw Dockets Coverage UniCourt covers over 4,000 state and federal courts across more than 40 states, with plans starting at $49 per month.30Datarade. UniCourt Profile Trellis focuses on state trial courts in 46 states and over 3,300 courts, with analytics on how specific judges have ruled.31Trellis. Trellis Coverage Docket Alarm offers full-text document search and real-time alerts for a flat $99 per month.32Docket Alarm. Docket Alarm
Most of these services also handle alerts, so you can get notified of new filings. CourtListener’s free RECAP Alerts send email notifications when new filings post in tracked federal cases; the service reported sending over 147,000 alert emails in a recent ten-day period.33Free Law Project. CourtListener In Texas, re:SearchTX’s paid tiers include case alerts and name alerts tied to specific people or entities.34re:SearchTX. re:SearchTX Subscription Plans
Tips That Actually Change Your Results
- Pick the right system first. Federal cases are on PACER or CourtListener. State cases live on the correct state or county portal. “County name + court record search” is the fastest way to find it.
- Search by case number when you have one. It’s faster and more precise than name searching, and in jurisdictions like Los Angeles it avoids per-search fees.19UCLA Law Library. State Court Dockets
- Account for name variations. People appear under different spellings, maiden names, and business entities. Some systems support wildcard characters; Minnesota, for example, allows trailing wildcards after two characters.11Minnesota Judicial Branch. Minnesota Court Records Online
- Narrow by jurisdiction and case type before searching. Running “all courts” produces results you can’t work with.35Stanford Law Library. Full Text Searches
- For older cases, go offline. Many state courts never digitized pre-2000s records. The clerk’s office or state archives may be the only route.10Texas State Law Library. Texas Court Records