What's in the RECAP Suite?

For years, we've been building tools to work with PACER data. On Friday, we bundled all of our best tools into what we're calling the "RECAP Suite."¹ Read below to learn what's in the package and get started.

1. The RECAP Archive

The RECAP Archive is a database of tens of millions of federal court cases and hundreds of millions of docket entries. We believe it's the largest database of it's kind that isn't behind a paywall, and it powers many of the tools in the RECAP Suite.

2. The RECAP Extensions

The RECAP extensions are where it all began, over a decade ago. With tens of thousands of users, these extensions for Chrome, IE Edge, Safari or Firefox help liberate records from the PACER system. If you use PACER, install RECAP. By crowdsourcing these records, it will save you money as soon as you start using it.

3. Docket Alerts

If you want to stay up to date with cases, you can subscribe to our docket alerts. Once subscribed, we'll send you an email whenever we learn about something new in the case. You can create a number of alerts for free, and you get even more if you have RECAP installed.

4. @recap.email Notification Handler

If you're an attorney that gets notifications from PACER, you can use our notification handler to contribute your cases to the RECAP Archive. We create a special email address for every CourtListener user. All you have to do is put that email address as a secondary recipient in the PACER system, and we'll start getting and processing your notifications.

5. PACER Fetch API

Too many people have spent time building scrapers and parsers for PACER data. If you use our PACER Fetch API, we'll gather the data from PACER on your behalf and spare you from having to build up your own scraping infrastructure. PACER data is just one API call away.

6. X-Ray Bad Redaction Detector

Badly redacted court records keep revealing private and proprietary information. It doesn't have to be this way, and we developed a tool to detect bad redactions before files are uploaded to any public system. For now, this tool is available via Python or command line, but we're planning to build an API for it as well, and considering building it into an extension.

7. Webhooks for Legal Data

Our system of webhooks allows you to link together events on our website with actions in your systems. For example, you could do something when there's a new search result, when there's a new filing in a case, or more. As a demo, we were able to make a PACER to Google Drive connector.

Honorable mentions

The tools below aren't officially part of the RECAP Suite for the moment, but if you're working with PACER data, you'll want to check them out.

1. Juriscraper

Juriscraper is our Python library that helps scrape content from court websites. If you want to build your own scraper, don't start from scratch. Grab Juriscraper and get to work.

2. Eyecite

Eyecite is a high performance, robust, open source tool for extracting legal citations from text. Built on our database of every reporter in American history, if you work with legal citations, it's a powerful place to start.

3. Doctor

Doctor is a microservice for converting and extracting documents and audio files. It's what we use to convert and do OCR on the millions of documents we have in our system. We make it free to use.

4. APIs & Replication

We have some of the largest collections of legal data in the world, and all of it is available via our APIs and database replication according to means-based pricing. If you need legal data, it's our mission to help you get it.

5. FJC IDB

Finally, the Integrated Database is a great resource maintained by the Federal Judicial Center. If you work with PACER data and haven't checked it out, you're missing out.