RECAP Search Alerts for PACER Are Now Live!

We’re excited to officially launch RECAP Search Alerts for PACER—a powerful new way to stay on top of the federal court system.

With this new feature, CourtListener will automatically notify you whenever there’s a new match in our PACER archive for any saved search you might have. You can follow topics, people, organizations, types of cases—anything you can search for, you can now monitor.

Case law alerts were the first feature we launched on CourtListener in 2010, and we’ve had PACER alerts on our roadmap since 2016! After six months in private beta, this feature is now live for everyone.

We think this will be a game-changer for attorneys, journalists, researchers, and public interest groups.

Use Cases

• Journalists can get notified the moment someone on their beat shows up in a new filing.
• Lawyers can track new cases that mention a client or a specific nature-of-suit code.
• Academics can monitor filings that cite specific case law.
• Investors can get emails when a publicly traded company is named in a lawsuit.

If it’s in the RECAP Archive, you can now track it automatically.

Part of a Growing Suite of Alert Tools

RECAP Search Alerts are the latest in our growing set of alert tools:

• Docket Alerts: Get updates when PACER dockets change.
• Search Alerts: For case law and oral arguments.
• Citation Alerts: Find out when key cases are cited.

We’re building the most comprehensive court monitoring system we can—and this is a big step forward.

🚀 How to Set Up a RECAP Search Alert

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Start by heading to the RECAP Archive and running a search.

For example, let’s say you want to monitor initial complaints that mention Trump, filed since January 20, 2025. Your query might look like this:

• Search term: Trump
• Filed after: January 20, 2025
• Document #: 1 (to match only initial complaints)

Once you’ve run your query, click the alert bell 🛎️ in the search bar:

You’ll be prompted to:

• Name your alert

• Choose how often to receive notifications (real-time, daily, weekly, or monthly)

• Pick between notifications for cases only, or for both cases and filings

  

Hit “Create Alert”—and that’s it. You’ll get emails that include the case name, docket number, document details, and more.

📉 Limitations of PACER Data

Although we ingest a huge amount of PACER data each day, because of PACER fees, we don’t have everything. Until PACER is open and free (we’re working on it), no system can promise instant, comprehensive results.

Because of these limitations, content sometimes arrives in our system well after it was filed in PACER. You may want to set your alerts to screen out old stuff that comes in weeks or months after it was entered into PACER. To handle this, we recommend using date filters on your alerts.

You can:

• Use a static date (e.g., Jan 20, 2025) to filter out older filings
• Use a rolling window (e.g., “last 7 days”) with Relative Dates for ongoing freshness

💡 Availability and Membership Tiers

Every CourtListener user gets five daily alerts—free, forever.

Want more? Join as an FLP Member and unlock additional alert capacity and real-time delivery.

Here’s how the tiers break down:

We also offer commercial licensing for organizations that need large-scale monitoring.

Your support helps us advance our mission: making the legal system more open, competitive, and just. Here are more ways to support us.

🔭 What’s Next?

We’re currently testing organizational-level alerts powered by our API and webhook infrastructure. These can support thousands or even millions of alerts—ideal for legal tech platforms, watchdog orgs, and high-scale workflows. Let us know if you want to try it.

We’re also building and researching:

• New alert destinations: Slack, SMS, Discord, and more
• “Bad word” alerts: Get notified when restricted or sensitive terms appear in filings (think trade secrets or the identities of minors)
• Streamlined citation alerts: Know when your certain case law is cited in new filings
• Docket alert upgrades: We’re expanding features for our most popular alert type

15 years after our first alert system, it feels like we’re just getting started. Thanks for being part of this journey to open up PACER—and the courts!