Court Records API vs Court Data API: Which One Your App Actually Needs

Short answer: a court records API gives you the raw filings (complaints, motions, exhibits, dockets, transcripts) the way PACER and state e-filing systems publish them. A court data API gives you the processed layer built on top: indexed opinions, citation networks, treatment flags, judge analytics. If you need the paper a court emitted, you want a records API. If you need intelligence built from many cases, you want a data API. Most production apps end up wiring both.

Reviewed and corrected on 12 October 2026. This is general information, not legal advice. Vendor facts come from each vendor's own pages, read on 12 October 2026.

TL;DR

• A court records API returns the literal filings: complaints, motions, exhibits, dockets, transcripts. PACER, RECAP, Docket Alarm, Bloomberg Law's dockets API, UniCourt, Trellis, and judyrecords sit here.
• A court data API returns the analytical layer: indexed opinions, citation graphs, treatment flags, judge biographies, structured case metadata. vLex and Lex Machina sit here.
• Common PACER API alternatives are RECAP for already-archived federal dockets, and commercial APIs such as UniCourt and Trellis that wrap PACER and state courts. PACER's own Case Locator API is an official option for case and party search.
• PACER costs $0.10 per page, capped at $3.00 per document. Searches and reports have no cap, and you are billed for a quarter only if you accrue more than $30 in it (PACER fee page).
• Many apps end up using both lanes, at very different price points. This post walks the distinction with real providers, prices where the vendor publishes them, and a decision tree at the end.

Part of our MCP and developer guide series.

For related MCP / API / developer coverage, see Best Legal Data APIs for Developers in 2026.

Why this terminology is broken

The two terms get used interchangeably on vendor pages, and that is the first reason developers waste a week picking the wrong product.

"Court data API" can mean an analytics surface on top of indexed cases (the Lex Machina pattern), raw opinion text, or a docket layer. "Court records API" usually means filings, but some vendors use it to describe opinion search too.

What you actually need to pick a vendor is to know what your product needs to do. Three questions cut through the marketing:

1. Do you need the actual filing PDF (complaint, motion, exhibit), or do you need the case to exist as a structured record with a docket number and parties?
2. Do you need indexed opinion text with citation networks, or just the docket?
3. Are you doing analytics across cases (judge tendencies, motion outcomes, time to trial), or single-case lookups?

The answers map cleanly to one of the two lanes.

Court records API: the filing layer

A court records API returns what a lawyer would pull off PACER or a state e-filing portal: docket sheets, individual filings as PDFs, exhibits, transcripts, party lists, judge assignments, and the procedural history of the case. It is the raw paper trail.

Use it when your product needs to track active cases (a litigation monitor, a docket-alert tool), retrieve specific filings (a brief generator that ingests the underlying complaint, a discovery-document tool), or audit the procedural history of a specific matter. Litigation finance, insurance defense, IP enforcement monitoring, plaintiff lead-gen all live here.

Providers worth knowing:

PACER itself. The federal-court system. PACER publishes a REST API: the PACER Case Locator (PCL) API, which searches a nationwide index of federal cases and parties, plus a separate Authentication API that trades a PACER username and password for a token. The PCL user guide says you send that token in an X-NEXT-GEN-CSO header on each search, that XML and JSON are both supported, and that all searches in the production environment are billable (a free QA environment exists for testing). Billing is $0.10 per page, capped at $3.00 per document, with audio files at $2.40 each. Searches and non-case-specific reports have no cap, and a quarter is billed only if you accrue more than $30 (PACER fee page). Costs can climb fast at production scale.

RECAP. A free archive of PACER documents that other users have already pulled, run by Free Law Project. It is offered as an API and as bulk data (Free Law Project). For a document that is not in the archive yet, RECAP's Fetch API can retrieve it from PACER using your own PACER account, and PACER then bills you; the CourtListener API guide covers the details.

Bloomberg Law's Enterprise Dockets API. Bloomberg Law's own page describes coverage of "over 200 million federal and state court dockets", a REST docket search API that returns JSON, and docket alerts delivered as JSON to a secure FTP site (Bloomberg Law). Sold through a demo request, and the page read shows no price. Our Bloomberg Law API guide goes through it.

Docket Alarm (part of Clio, which owns vLex and Fastcase). Docket search, alerts and tracking. Its pricing page lists a flat-fee plan at $99 per user per month, which excludes PACER fees, and a pay-as-you-go plan from $39.99 per month (Docket Alarm pricing). Its Developer API page lists search, docket and document endpoints and invites you to get in touch about access, and shows no API price. Fastcase's Legal Data API page describes Docket Alarm data covering "over 400 million documents and docket sheets from federal courts, agencies, over 25 state courts, and hundreds of county courts."

UniCourt. A commercial option for both federal and state records. UniCourt's API page says its APIs connect to "140+ million federal (PACER) and state court records", and its suite includes a Court Data API, a Legal Analytics API and a PACER API. Its homepage describes 4,000+ state and federal courts across 40+ states and over 2 billion dockets and documents. No price is published on the pages read, so expect a sales conversation.

Trellis. State trial court records plus federal data. Its API page lists alerts, search, docket and case data, rulings, documents, judges and webhooks, and says API V2 (May 2024) added federal and PACER integration on top of the state layer. Trellis's support site says it provides state trial court coverage across 45 states, and its coverage table has 45 rows, one of them the District of Columbia. Its pages do not show an API price.

judyrecords. It has an API, contrary to what older write-ups (including an earlier version of this post) claimed. Its API page lists a Full-Text API across over 750M cases and a Structured Objects API across over 725M cases and 1.4B parties, and says programmatic access is permitted exclusively through the API. API enquiries go to the contact address on that page.

The shared trait across this lane: the underlying data has acquisition cost. PACER pages cost money, and state courts each publish in their own way. That cost reaches the API consumer somehow, either directly or inside a sales-led contract.

What the free routes give you, and where they stop

Before you pay anyone, see what the public systems hand out for nothing. You may need less than you think.

PACER's price page has more fine print than "$0.10 a page." On its fee page, the federal courts say the $3 cap applies to one document, such as a docket, motion, order, judgment or brief. Searches and reports have no cap. A search is billed by the pages it makes "even if the search displays “no matches found.”" Transcripts have no cap either. The page's own tip is to search by case number, not by party name, since a common name can return a lot of pages. A Hacker News commenter put it this way in October 2021: "It sounds cheap, but one bad search and you may be fetching 100s of pages" (fhrow4484). Build your lookups around case numbers and you dodge the worst of it.

RECAP is the community answer. Free Law Project, the nonprofit that runs it, dates the project to 2009. Install the RECAP browser extension and your PACER purchases go into a shared archive. By Free Law's own description, the archive holds "tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER." It is also offered as an API and as bulk data.

Free opinions come from the government too. The E-Government Act requires the text of written opinions issued after April 16, 2005 to be available in a searchable format. The Government Publishing Office hosts them in its United States Courts Opinions collection. It covers selected appellate, district and bankruptcy courts, mostly back to 2004, and signs the files digitally so you can check them. The word "selected" matters. Free Law Project's PACER fact sheet reports that "courts are wildly inconsistent about marking documents as opinions." Its analysis points to clerks and judges who label documents in different ways. Free opinion text exists. Do not assume it is complete.

State courts set their own access rules. In August 2002 the chief justices and the court administrators of the states endorsed model guidelines on public access to court records. They passed them to each state "as a starting point" for building "their own policies and court rules governing public access to court records." States set their own rules, which helps explain why state coverage looks like a patchwork.

Court data API: the indexed-opinion and analytics layer

A court data API returns the structured intelligence built on top of cases: opinion full text, citation graphs, treatment flags (overruled, distinguished, criticized), case headnotes, judge biographies, party history, statutory citations within opinions. It is the layer where the case has been processed, not just published.

Use it when your product needs to ground answers in actual law (a legal-research agent, a citation-check tool, a brief generator), surface "good law" status (a Shepardize-equivalent feature), do analytics across cases (motion-grant rates, settlement timing), or recommend similar cases.

Providers worth knowing:

vLex (part of Clio, alongside Fastcase and Vincent AI). Clio completed its acquisition of vLex on 10 November 2025 and describes vLex's library as more than one billion editorially enriched documents across 110 jurisdictions (vLex announcement). Fastcase sells data feeds and a Legal Data API through its sales team. Our Fastcase, vLex and Clio API guide has the detail.

Westlaw and LexisNexis. Both vendors run developer portals, and neither publishes prices. Access to Thomson Reuters APIs goes through sales, and LexisNexis takes applications through a form. Details are in our Westlaw API guide and LexisNexis API guide, and the wider picture is in LexisNexis and Westlaw API alternatives for developers.

Lex Machina. Analytics-focused, and part of LexisNexis. Its developer portal says the API is available to Lex Machina customers and returns data on cases, parties, counsel, judges and outcomes for federal district and appeals courts and various state and specialty courts (Lex Machina developer portal).

Statute and primary-law APIs. Adjacent to the case-data layer but distinct. A primary-law API exposes the US Constitution, US Code, CFR, the Federal Rules of Procedure, state statute codes, state constitutions, state court rules, and Executive Orders since 2015.

Case law typically sits in a separate product surface, not the statutes API. The distinction matters for your architecture: if your product needs unified case plus statute access, plan for two API surfaces and a thin merge layer of your own.

Where the two lanes overlap

Some providers serve both lanes from one platform. Bloomberg Law and vLex sell dockets and research together, so the choice between "we need records" and "we need data" can collapse into one contract.

Records is what the court emitted; data is what got built on top of it.

That is the cleanest mental model. The same vendor can publish both when it does the indexing itself.

The decision tree

Four common product cases, with the right lane for each:

1. Litigation monitor or docket alert tool. Records layer. Start with RECAP and a PACER fallback. Look at Bloomberg Law, UniCourt or Trellis if your customers need state coverage.
2. Citation-grounded legal research agent (the "Westlaw, but AI" category). Data layer. Ask vLex, Westlaw and Lexis what their API contracts allow before you plan around them.
3. Discovery or brief ingestion tool that needs the actual filings. Records layer. RECAP and on-demand PACER pulls, budgeted carefully.
4. Judge or motion analytics, win-rate dashboards. Lex Machina (customers only), or an in-house analytics layer over a licensed opinion corpus and structured judge metadata, which is a large build.

Pricing reality

Roughly, by lane:

A few notes most marketing pages do not surface:

• PACER charges add up. As an illustration, a docket with 200 filings averaging 10 pages each is $200 at $0.10 per page ($1 per filing, under the $3 cap) just to pull the case once, before any searches.
• Westlaw and Lexis API access goes through their sales or application processes, so ask early what you may do with the data.

Gotchas across both lanes

A few production lessons that translate across vendors.

State coverage varies. RECAP covers federal courts. State court data is split across vendors and each state's own portals, and the coverage claims differ (for example, Trellis says 45 states for state trial courts and UniCourt says 40+ states). If your product needs uniform state coverage, test the courts you need before you sign.

Citation formats are not standardized across sources. If you are merging across vendors, write a canonical citation parser upfront.

What to do this week

If you are scoping a legal product right now:

1. Write down which of the four use cases you are actually solving. If you cannot pick one, you are scoping too broadly.
2. Match the use case to the lane (records or data) using the decision tree above.
3. Start free where you can. RECAP for already-archived federal records is good enough to validate a v1.
4. Budget for the lane you missed. Most products eventually need both. Plan the architecture for that from day one, with a thin merge layer between sources.

FAQ

What is the difference between a court records API and a court data API?

A court records API returns the filings a court emitted: dockets, complaints, motions, exhibits, transcripts, the way PACER and state e-filing portals publish them. A court data API returns the layer built on top: indexed opinion text, citation networks, treatment flags, and judge analytics. Records is the paper; data is the intelligence derived from it.

What is the best PACER API alternative?

For already-archived federal dockets, RECAP is the cheapest path. For commercial coverage, UniCourt's API page cites 140+ million federal and state records, and PACER's own Case Locator API handles nationwide case and party search. PACER itself bills the underlying pages at $0.10 each, capped at $3.00 per document.

Does PACER have an official API?

Yes. PACER publishes a Case Locator (PCL) API for nationwide case and party search and a separate Authentication API that issues a token you reuse until it expires. Both use JSON or XML, and production searches are billable.

Is court data always public and free to use?

Court records are generally public, but access is not free. PACER charges per page, and state courts set their own access rules and fees. RECAP is free because it re-publishes federal dockets that users already pulled, but it only covers what is already in the archive. Commercial APIs like UniCourt and Trellis charge for normalization, coverage, and uptime.

How do court data providers get their information?

Vendors differ, and few publish their sourcing in detail. Federal data typically traces back to PACER and state data to each state's court systems. What the vendors sell on top is normalization, entity resolution (linking parties, attorneys and judges across cases) and a stable API.

Can I get state court records through one API?

Not uniformly. Federal coverage runs through PACER and RECAP, while state coverage is split across vendors such as UniCourt, Trellis and Bloomberg Law, each with its own stated coverage. If your product needs broad state coverage, test the courts you need rather than assuming one provider covers them.

Do I need a case-law API or a statutes API?

They are different surfaces. Case law (opinions, dockets, citations) comes from PACER and RECAP or the vendors above. Statutes and regulations (US Code, CFR, state codes, the Constitution, Federal Rules) come from a separate primary-law API. If your product needs both, plan for two API surfaces and your own thin merge layer.

Vaquill AI's public API is built for primary law: US Code, CFR, state statutes and regulations, state constitutions, court rules, and Executive Orders. For filings and dockets, RECAP or PACER, as above, are the sources to look at. For the statutes side, see the US primary law API.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill AI: the pipelines that pull statutes, regulations and court rules from every US jurisdiction's official publisher, and the REST API, MCP server and open dataset that serve them.