Receive Alerts for Federal Court Case Updates with Docket Watch

Since adding federal court data in March, we’ve collected information on 1.75M federal court cases containing 13.7M docket entries which are the line items showing progress of the case with attached documents. We made federal court dockets user visible in April. Users have saved hundreds of searches that include federal courts and we’ve notified them of thousands of new cases.

Because an active case may have dozens of docket entries added in a single day, we date a court case in search results based on the first entry collected and only include a particular case docket in search alerts once. For new case discovery this is most appropriate, but we originally planned, and several users have since requested, the ability to receive alerts when a case that they’ve already discovered is updated with new entries.

New Docket Watch Feature

We’ve just released the Docket Watch feature. Signed in users will find a new button in the right corner of each docket detail page. Initially the eye has a slash to indicate that this docket is not being watched:

Click the button to reveal alert settings and press Save:

Once the docket watch is set, we’ll send you new custom alerts showing the docket summary details as well as the new entry(s) which prompted the alert. You can follow the case link for access to the PACER hosted source documents (¢) as well as to update your watch setting or to stop watching.

Your Docket Watches are also displayed in the search sidebar, Saved Searches section for easy navigation to these dockets of interest.

Court reporters will already be familiar with federal court docket IDs. Since these IDs, unlike case titles, are reliably of a limited size we are currently using them for docket watch alert email subject lines as well as for identification in the search sidebar. For some this may prove awkward over time, and we are considering how to make the naming more human friendly in a future release.

Please try out the new Docket Watch feature on some active federal cases you are interested in tracking, and let us know your experiences!