Announcing Oral Arguments on CourtListener

We're very excited to announce that CourtListener is currently in the process of rolling out support for Oral Argument audio. This is a feature that we've wanted for at least four years -- our name is CourtListener, after all -- and one that will bring a raft of new features to the project. We already have about 500 oral arguments on the site, and we've got many more we'll be adding over the coming weeks.

For now we are getting oral argument audio in real time from ten federal appellate courts. As we get this audio, we are using it to power a number of features:

• Oral Argument files become immediately available in our search results.
• A podcast is automatically available for every jurisdiction we support and for any query that you can dream up. Want a custom podcast containing all of the 9th circuit arguments for a particular litigant? You got it.
• You can now get alerts for oral arguments so you can be sure that you keep up with the latest coming out of the courts.
• For developers, there are a number of new endpoints in both our REST API and our bulk data API for audio files.
• Using the Free Law Seal Rookery, we are enhancing the audio we find on court websites by adding album art and better meta data.

For now, search results and alerts are limited to the data that is provided by court websites, so you cannot (yet) get alerted any time somebody says a certain word in court. Audio is a new area for us though and we'd absolutely love to automatically create transcripts for the courts, enabling such a feature. This would be an incredibly powerful feature, so if you are an expert on audio transcription, we'd love to hear from you and to work together on this.

Beyond all of the great features we're rolling out today, oral argument data also marks an important turning point for the project because it lays the ground work for adding more types of data to CourtListener. It's been a large undertaking adding a second type of data to the project, but adding a third will be much easier. Next in our hopper will likely be the content from RECAP so that you can create alerts, have powerful APIs, and do all the other things you expect from CourtListener, except this time, for documents from PACER.

We're very excited about being able to provide oral argument data today and RECAP data tomorrow. We can't wait to see what kinds of legal research and innovation these new features bring.