RECAP Suite — Turning PACER Around Since 2009
The RECAP Suite is a collection of tools for working with PACER, the data access system for American federal courts.
If you use PACER, consider installing the RECAP extension in your browser. If you are a researcher, you can search millions of federal filings in the RECAP Archive. Journalists and court watchers will find docket alerts invaluable. If you get notifications from PACER, check out our NEF notification handler.
If you use PACER, install RECAP.
Once the RECAP extension is installed, your PACER purchases will be automatically added to the RECAP Archive. Anything somebody else has added to the archive will be available to you for free — right in PACER itself.
The RECAP extension is private and secure by design. It only has access to the PACER and CourtListener websites and does not track you or care who you are.
Tens of thousands of people use the RECAP extension. To join them, install the extension in your browser using the button above, and then use PACER as you normally would.
It's that simple. If you don't like it, you can uninstall the extension at any time.
Have questions? We're here to help.
The Archives and APIs
Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions of pages that were originally scanned PDFs.
The RECAP Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily.
Finally, we make the RECAP Archive available via an API or as bulk data for journalists, researchers, startups, and developers.
Use Docket Alerts to Keep Up with Cases
Thousands of journalists and court watchers subscribe to our docket alerts to know when there are new filings in cases they follow. You can create a number of alerts for free, and you get even more if you have the RECAP extension installed.
Creating a docket alert is easy. Just find a case you want to follow and press the button that says "Get Alerts". That's it.
The @recap.email ECF Notification Handler
If you're an attorney that gets notifications from PACER, you can use our notification handler to automatically contribute your cases and filings to the RECAP Archive.
We create a special email address for every CourtListener user. All you have to do is add that email address as a secondary recipient in the PACER system, and we'll start getting and processing your notifications. Set and forget — until you want to do full text search on your case!
And More…
The RECAP Suite also has tools for techies, including:
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Webhooks so events on our website can trigger workflows in your systems.
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An API for purchasing PACER content, so you don't have to scrape it yourself.
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A tool for finding bad redactions in filings.
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A Python package for pulling citations out of text.
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A microservice for extracting text from documents, including doing OCR.
What People are Saying
Recap is an invaluable resource for journalists, activists - and really anyone who cares about law and justice in the United States. The work of the Free Law Project puts our courts within reach for everyone, and reinforces a pillar of democracy that is often overlooked. Everyone should support — and contribute — to this effort.
If you are a PACER user, I strongly encourage you to download RECAP.
Citizens deserve open and easy access to all public court documents. Until public access becomes a matter of policy rather than blocked by PACER's artificial pay wall, independent efforts like RECAP continue to fill a critical gap in our ability to foster a more participatory and engaged democracy.
For More Information, See…
We also have an API and bulk data available for developers. For details, get in touch.
