State court records data feed
- Coverage
- Explicit state list
- Cadence
- Daily new filings
- Typical volume
- ~25k records
- Difficulty
- Very high
- Price
- $2,000 / mo
What's in it
Civil case index records from state court portals, filtered to the case types and parties you specify:
- Case index - case number, court, filing date, case type, current status, disposition date
- Parties - plaintiff and defendant names with roles, normalized for matching against your own list
- Property matters - foreclosure, lis pendens, quiet title, mechanic's liens, with the property address or parcel where the court publishes it
- Judgments and liens - judgment amounts, judgment creditors, abstracts of judgment
- Evictions - unlawful detainer filings and dispositions, where the state publishes them
- Docket activity - latest entry date and text, so you can see movement without pulling documents
Case types are selected from an allow-list rather than filtered with a deny-list, so sealed, juvenile, and family matters cannot enter the corpus by accident. Coverage ships as an explicit list of the states and courts included, on every delivery, rather than an implied national footprint.
Delivery
Daily delta on new filings, weekly on status changes. Lands in S3, a webhook, or your database. Every run carries a manifest naming the courts that responded and the ones that did not, because in this source a quiet court and a court with no new filings look identical unless you measure it.
Why this one is hard
There is no national court system, and "50 states" overstates what anyone can actually deliver. Fewer than half the states run a genuine statewide portal. In the rest, the real unit is the county or the judicial district, which means this source carries its own several-hundred-jurisdiction problem underneath the state-level one. Any vendor quoting you uniform national court coverage is quoting you something they cannot produce.
The terms are stricter than anywhere else in public records, and they are not just website terms. Several states restrict automated access by court rule or administrative order, which is a different kind of obligation from a terms-of-use page. That is why this feed is priced and scoped on a declared state list: states that do not clear a terms review are excluded and named, rather than quietly included and hoped about.
Sealing and redaction are handled at the source inconsistently. A matter sealed in one county may be visible in another's index for a period before it is pulled. Running this responsibly means an allow-list on case type, active handling of withdrawn records, and a correction path that actually removes data rather than marking it inactive.
Name matching is the hard part, not fetching. Court parties are free-text, frequently misspelled, often missing middle names, and sometimes carry the attorney rather than the party. Matching a docket to the company or person on your list is a scored, evidence-carrying operation, and any feed that hands you a confident match with no evidence is hiding a guess.
Where a state prohibits crawling but sells a bulk subscription, buying it is the right answer and goes into the quote as a pass-through.
Build versus buy
Build it yourself if you need one state you have already cleared legally and your case-type filter is narrow. Single-state court scraping is a well-trodden path.
Buy it when the answer has to span states, because the expensive part is not the scraping. It is the per-state terms review, the exclusion decisions, the allow-list maintenance, and the name matching. Those costs are the same whether you run three states or thirteen, and they recur. Weigh that against $2,000/mo, and weigh it again against what it costs to be wrong about a state you should not have been crawling.
One use restriction worth stating plainly, because it changes who can buy this: court data delivered here is not a consumer report and is not licensed for FCRA-covered decisions about employment, credit, insurance, or housing. If that is your use case, you need a consumer reporting agency, not a data feed.
Related
This feed is part of the Property & Public Record Stack ($5,500/mo), where court filings are joined to parcel records and entity filings so a foreclosure or lien resolves to a property and an owner rather than sitting as a loose case record.