Court records data: civil case records, judgments, and bankruptcy in one schema
Court records are the most fragmented public dataset in the country. Every state runs its own court system, most counties run their own clerks, and the federal courts run separately again. Civil case records in one jurisdiction are called something else in the next, indexed differently, and published with a different set of fields. A national court records database does not exist as a public thing. It exists only if someone builds it.
Recordpipe builds it for the jurisdictions and case types you need. Civil litigation, judgments, evictions, foreclosures, probate, small claims, and bankruptcy filings each come through in one normalized schema, with the originating court's case type and case number preserved so every record traces back to its source. Court docket data — the entries themselves, not just the case header — is delivered where the court publishes it.
The point is not volume. It is a court case dataset your team can query the way it queries its own systems: by party, by court, by case type, by date range, by status. Delivered as files, through an API, or by webhook when a case you watch moves.
Court docket data and court case data: the fields that do the work
A case header tells you a lawsuit exists. Court docket data tells you what is happening in it. Recordpipe delivers both. The header carries case number, court, jurisdiction, case type, filing date, parties and their roles, nature of suit as the court labels it, and current status. The docket carries each entry the court publishes — motions, orders, hearings, judgments, dismissals — with its date and text, in order.
Court case data becomes useful when it is joined and tracked. Party names are normalized so an entity that is a defendant in several counties reads as one party across the dataset, with the court's original spelling kept beside it. Cases are tracked through their lifecycle and updated in place: a case filed last quarter that reaches judgment this week shows the judgment, the amount, and the date on the same record.
The AI analysis layer handles what used to take a paralegal: deduping cases re-indexed by the court, classifying case types across jurisdictions to a common taxonomy, flagging the entries your team cares about — a judgment entered, a bankruptcy filed, a motion to dismiss granted — and ranking new activity against the criteria set in scoping.
Judgments database, lawsuit data, and litigation data for monitoring
Most teams do not want every case. They want to know when something happens to the parties they care about. A judgments database answers who has an unsatisfied judgment against them, for how much, entered by which court, and whether it has been satisfied or released. Lawsuit data answers who is suing whom, on what claim, and how the docket is moving. Litigation data across a book of counterparties, vendors, borrowers, or competitors answers whether risk is building somewhere before it arrives.
Recordpipe runs that monitoring as a pipeline. You provide the party list, or the criteria — case types, courts, claim amounts, industries — and the feed delivers new filings and docket movement on a daily or weekly cadence, by webhook when speed matters. A bankruptcy filings list built on the same infrastructure carries chapter, court, filing date, and debtor as published.
One necessary line. Court records are raw public data, not consumer reports, and Recordpipe is not a consumer reporting agency. Monitoring counterparties, sourcing litigation finance opportunities, research, and business development are what this is built for. Any use case that touches an individual's credit, employment, housing, or insurance eligibility gets compliance review at intake.
Court records API and national court records database, delivered your way
A court records API is the right shape when your platform needs to pull a case or a party's litigation history on request. Flat files are the right shape for a data team loading a jurisdiction into a warehouse. Webhooks are the right shape for a monitoring desk that needs a judgment flagged the day it posts. Recordpipe delivers through all of them, plus a dashboard, from one schema, and a one-time backfill of historical civil case records runs on the same pipeline as the ongoing feed.
Coverage honesty matters more here than in any other dataset, because courts vary so much in what they publish. Some post full dockets; some post a case index only; some publish on a lag; some restrict certain case types. The $500 scoping maps exactly what your target courts publish and how fast, delivers a sample of real records, and returns a fixed quote within 5 business days, credited against the contract.
From there it is a fixed-price engagement from $5,000 to $3 million depending on jurisdictions, case types, history, and cadence, on infrastructure that processes over one million public records nightly. Submit the intake form; we reply within 2 business days.
What a delivery looks like
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| case_number | The court's own case identifier — your verification path back to the source. |
| court_name | Court, division, and jurisdiction where the case was filed, as published. |
| case_type | Court's original case type plus a normalized category: civil, judgment, eviction, foreclosure, probate, small claims, bankruptcy. |
| filing_date | Date the case was filed with the court. |
| parties | Plaintiffs, defendants, debtors, and other parties with their roles, as published, each with a normalized name for matching. |
| nature_of_suit | Claim type or cause of action as the court labels it, where published. |
| status | Current case status: open, closed, judgment entered, dismissed, stayed, or discharged, normalized. |
| judgment_amount | Monetary judgment and satisfaction status where the court publishes them. |
| docket_entries | Ordered docket entries with date and text, delivered where the court publishes the docket. |
| last_activity_at | Date of the most recent docket entry, plus the first-seen timestamp for your freshness audit. |