Trellis API: What State Court Data It Offers and Who It Fits

Short answer: Yes, Trellis has an API (a way for software to ask another service for data). It serves state trial court data: dockets, which are the running record of filings and events in a case, plus rulings, documents, judge profiles and alerts. Federal and bankruptcy court data were added in May 2024. Access starts with a conversation with Trellis sales and a free trial. The pages read give no API price, no rate limits and no public reference with endpoint paths. This guide uses only Trellis's own pages and neutral press, read in early October 2026, and says so wherever a page is silent.

TL;DR

• Trellis is a state trial court data company. It started as judge analytics for California and now says it covers 45 jurisdictions, county by county.
• The API is real and documented in outline. Search, case lookup, documents, judges, rulings, alerts, usage and webhooks are all named on Trellis's pages.
• Access goes through sales. The support page says to contact Trellis Sales to begin a free trial. No price is published for the API.
• Coverage is a county list. Documents come in three kinds: free, free to request, and purchasable for an extra fee.
• Check the terms. Trellis's public website terms ban automated access and resale. The API contract is not public, so ask which terms apply.

Which Trellis is this?

Search results for "trellis api" are crowded. They include a 3D-model generation service, a Python client library and other software that share the name. This guide covers Trellis Research, Inc., the Los Angeles company behind trellis.law, which sells court data to law firms, companies and developers.

What Trellis is

A trial court is the court where a case starts and, in most cases, ends. Appeals courts publish written opinions, and most legal research tools are built on those. Trial courts produce a different pile of paper: complaints, motions, orders and a docket for every case. In the United States that record sits in thousands of county court systems, each with its own website and format.

Trellis collects that record and puts it into one searchable database. Its support site describes the company as an AI-powered legal research and analytics platform "built by litigators for litigators." The product is organized around a few things:

• Smart Search over dockets, rulings and filed documents.
• Judge analytics, such as how often a judge grants a given kind of motion.
• Attorney and law firm analysis, built from public case history.
• Verdicts, alerts and a state rules library.

LawSites, the legal technology blog by journalist Bob Ambrogi, reported in August 2026 that Trellis claims the largest set of US state trial court data, with more than 2.5 billion records. The same article lists four ways customers reach it: the core platform, a chat tool called Trellis Chat, AI connectors for ChatGPT, Claude and other tools, and a direct API for pulling records into a firm's own systems.

A short history of Trellis

Trellis begins with one lawyer's problem. In a 2019 interview with Ambrogi, quoted in LawSites, founder Nicole Clark said that while she was a litigation associate in Los Angeles, "every time someone would go before a new judge, an email would go around the firm asking for information on the judge." She started collecting that data for herself.

The dates, as the press recorded them:

• 2016 to 2018. TechCrunch says Clark began collecting the data in 2016 and founded the company in 2018. She went through the Techstars accelerator in Los Angeles.
• March 27, 2019. Above the Law, in a report by Ambrogi, covered the formal launch with $2 million in seed funding. It said Trellis held more than 5.3 million California superior court documents and dockets, covering 39 of the state's 58 counties.
• February 5, 2020. TechCrunch reported a $4.4 million round led by Craft Ventures and the arrival of Alon Shwartz as technical co-founder and chief product officer.
• July 20, 2020. dot.LA reported expansion from California into New York, Florida and Texas.
• October 2021. LawSites reported a $14.1 million Series A led by Headline. At that point Trellis said it aggregated data from 362 trial courts in 12 states.
• March 2, 2023. Trellis's own blog announced that it was now providing state trial court data through an API. In April 2022, a podcast listing had described API access as upcoming.
• August 31, 2023. Law.com's Legal Tech News, carried by Legal Tech Monitor, reported a $15 million investment with plans for generative AI features.
• May 2024. The support page says API version 2 arrived, adding federal court and PACER integration. PACER is the federal courts' own records system.
• May 13, 2026. Trellis announced a Claude connector. In August it added a ChatGPT plugin and Trellis Chat.

That is a climb from 362 courts in 12 states to a published figure of 3,335 courts in 45 jurisdictions, in five years.

Clark explained the hard part in a 2020 Legal Talk Network interview. Her answer on how Trellis gets the data was: "every county is separate and we have to really code into each county and then from thereon the data comes in automatically." That one sentence is the reason this kind of data is sold rather than given away. Someone has to build and maintain a connection for every county.

What the Trellis API offers

Trellis's pages describe the API in three layers, written at different times.

The 2023 launch post. It lists eight areas, and says the API "requires authentication via a token", meaning a secret string sent with each request to prove who you are:

1. Alerts. Create and delete alerts, as in the website.
2. Case. Look up a case number, attorneys, documents, events, parties and refresh status.
3. Documents. Download, request and purchase court documents.
4. Judges. Information like a judge biography page.
5. Rulings. Data like a ruling page.
6. Search. Boolean and query search, with filtering and sorting, over cases, documents and rulings.
7. Usage. Usage figures for the current billing cycle.
8. Webhooks. A webhook is a message Trellis sends to your system when something happens. Here they cover refreshes and alerts.

The post adds that responses may return extra tokens for the next page of results, that Trellis does not send emails to API users and requires webhooks for document purchases and alerts, and that API subscriptions are "completely independent" of website subscriptions. Usage in the website is not counted on the API usage figures. API subscriptions are billed on the first of the month.

The 2024 support page. It lists Alerts, Smart Search, Docket and case data (parties, attorneys, documents, events), Docket Refresh, Rulings, Documents, Judges and Webhook. Docket Refresh matters to a developer. It means you can ask Trellis to update a docket when you do not see the latest event.

The API page. It groups the offer into four flavors by customer: a legal practice API, a litigation insights API about peer law firms, a marketing API for lead generation, and a real estate API for foreclosure alerts and landlord and tenant data. Its FAQ says the endpoints cover "case, party, county, document, and judicial rulings" for state, federal and bankruptcy trial courts, and that sample code, documentation and support are available.

Coverage as Trellis publishes it

Trellis's site says it "covers 45 states and 3,335 courts in 2,481 counties." A support article says state trial court coverage spans 45 states. The coverage table on trellis.law has 45 rows, and one of them is the District of Columbia. Its county column adds up to the same 2,481.

That table is the useful part, because it works county by county. The county count for each state varies a lot. Texas is listed with 254, Georgia with 157 and Nevada with 2. For each state it also marks which kinds of content exist: civil, family and probate cases, documents, verdicts, judge biographies, judge analytics, state law, motions and issues, and tentative rulings. A tentative ruling is a judge's draft decision, issued before a hearing in courts that use the practice. Not every state has every column.

The public table also lists federal courts: the Supreme Court, the federal circuits and some bankruptcy courts.

Documents come in three kinds

The coverage support article explains that access to the actual court papers depends on where the case sits:

• Free documents are included in a subscription.
• Requestable documents are included up to a monthly limit, in Los Angeles County, California and Cook County, Illinois. Trellis says it emails them within 20 minutes.
• Purchasable documents cost an additional fee, which "may vary." The article lists counties in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Washington.

The API's Documents area covers downloading, requesting and purchasing, so the same cost structure applies to anyone building on it.

The numbers move between pages

Different Trellis pages give slightly different figures. The API page says 3,335 courts. The Claude announcement says "more than 3,000 courts" and "2,500+ counties." LawSites quotes "more than 3,500 courts." The MCP guide says "40+ states", and the MCP technical page lists a county table that adds up to 2,671, against 2,481 on the coverage page. That is normal for a company that keeps adding courts. A 2022 podcast listing describes Trellis as on a mission to add a county court a day. It is also why you want a dated, per-county schedule in your contract.

Other ways in: Claude, ChatGPT and Trellis Chat

Besides the API, Trellis runs an MCP server, a connection that lets an AI assistant call a service as a tool. Its technical documentation lists tools for searching cases, getting a case with its parties and events, fetching complaints, searching and retrieving documents, searching verdicts, finding judges and their profiles, searching parties and expert witnesses, and four analytics tools: judge analytics, law firm analytics and two verdict statistics tools. It also lists a search for California tentative rulings.

Some details from that page and the May announcement:

• Sign-in uses OAuth 2.0, a standard login flow, and no API keys are exposed to the client.
• None of the tools creates, changes or deletes data.
• The connector works with Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot.
• It is included in active Trellis subscriptions at no extra cost. Free accounts can use it up to a defined limit, after which they are asked to subscribe.
• Some dockets arrive before complaint documents do. The page says metadata (parties, filing date, docket number) can be present while the complaint text is not yet, because not every court makes complaints public.
• Trellis says it is SOC 2 compliant, meaning an independent auditor has tested its security controls. Its privacy page says Trellis does not control Claude's privacy settings, which Anthropic governs.

LawSites adds that Trellis calls these connectors the first in a series of planned integrations. For a builder, this means two routes to the same data: a customer-facing API for your own software, and a connector for an assistant your staff already use.

Access, price and terms

Access. The support page answers "How do I access the API?" with one line: contact Trellis Sales to begin your free trial. The API page has a demo form that asks what type of organization you are, with choices such as law firm, corporation, government, journalist, academia and non-profit. The pages read describe no self-serve sign-up, key page or public sandbox.

Price. Trellis publishes plans for its website, which are metered in "content views", meaning a count of items you open. It publishes no price for the API. The 2023 post says API billing is separate and monthly. Everything else about API pricing is a question for sales.

Terms. Trellis's public Terms of Service, effective May 2026, cover trellis.law and its online services. Four clauses matter to a builder:

• Use of the online services "via mechanical, programmatic, robotic, scripted or any other automated means" is prohibited.
• Nobody may offer any part of the services for "commercial resale or commercial redistribution."
• The information may not be used to decide a person's eligibility for credit or insurance for personal or household purposes, for employment, or for a government license or benefit. The terms define "consumer" by reference to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the federal law on consumer reports.
• Users may not access the services from outside the United States.

Those terms refer to a Subscription Agreement. The pages read do not say whether API customers sign the same terms or a separate contract, and no API agreement is published. That is a normal place for enterprise terms to sit, and it is the first thing to ask about.

Who it fits

Trellis fits you if your product or team needs what happens in state trial courts: who sued whom, which judge, which motions, how they were decided, and what verdicts followed. The company's own examples are litigation teams, law firm business development, insurers and financial firms checking exposure, and real estate teams watching foreclosures. A customer quote on the API page, from Amy Carr of Bowman and Brooke, puts the draw plainly: "We use the platform to get into state court data, filings and dockets across the country from a single point of access, with analytics layered on top."

It is a different tool from a primary-law source. Statutes, regulations and court rules are the written law itself. Trial court data is the record of what parties filed and what judges did. Many products need both, which is the lane split covered in court records API vs court data API.

What Trellis publishes, in one table

What developers and users say

Trellis's own page carries customer praise, like the quote above. Outside voices are fewer, and most are small.

On Hacker News, a site for software developers, Trellis tends to appear as a place people point to for a filing or a judge. In November 2020 a commenter, tomorrowfuture, answered a post about a court records search site by saying "trellis.law does something similar their searches are indexed and have rulings and documents as well." In January 2025, user ajb linked a Trellis page in a thread and wrote "This is the complaint, in case anyone is curious". Neither is a review. Both show Trellis document pages being used as a public source.

Independent reviews of the API are thin. The press record is mostly about funding and launches, and the customer quotes sit on Trellis's own pages. Ask Trellis for API customers you can speak to.

Questions to ask before you choose

1. Which counties, case types and years do I need, and can you give me a dated, per-county schedule in writing?
2. Which agreement governs API use, and does the ban on automated access in the website terms apply to me?
3. What may I do with the data inside my own product? Can I show records to my customers?
4. What are the API rate limits, and what does a docket refresh cost?
5. Which documents are free, which are requestable and which are purchasable in my counties, and who pays for purchases?
6. How are motion outcomes and judge figures classified, and which courts and dates feed a given number?
7. How fresh is a docket, and how do I know when a record last updated?
8. If my product touches decisions about individuals, which uses do the terms allow?
9. Can I see the SOC 2 report?

The ten questions to ask a legal data vendor covers the checklist that applies to any provider, and the buyer's guide to legal data explains the PACER fee story that sits behind federal dockets.

Where to read next

For the wider map of US legal data sources, start with US law data: the complete guide. For another vendor guide written the same way, see Midpage API: what it offers and who it fits. If your product also needs the written law, Vaquill AI is built for US statutes, regulations, court rules and agency guidance, retrieved by citation, through the US primary law API.

FAQ

Does Trellis have an API?

Yes. Trellis offers a trial court data API. It launched for state courts in March 2023 and added federal and PACER data in version 2 in May 2024. Its pages name search, case lookup, documents, judges, rulings, alerts, usage and webhooks.

Is the Trellis API free?

Trellis's support page says to contact Trellis Sales to begin a free trial. It publishes no price for the API. The website plans are priced separately, and the 2023 launch post says API subscriptions are independent of them.

How do I get a Trellis API key?

The pages read describe a sales route: contact Trellis, begin a trial, and receive credentials. Authentication uses a token. No self-serve key page is described.

Which states does Trellis cover?

Trellis says it covers 45 jurisdictions, with the District of Columbia counted among them, across 3,335 courts and 2,481 counties. Its coverage table lists each state with a county count and the content types available. Check your counties, since coverage works county by county.

Does the Trellis API include federal court data?

Yes, from version 2 in May 2024. The API page says it connects to state, federal and bankruptcy trial court cases, including PACER.

Can I use Trellis data in my own product?

Trellis's public website terms bar commercial resale and redistribution and automated access to the website. They also limit use for decisions about individuals. Those terms cover its online services. Ask Trellis which terms apply to the API and what you may show to your own customers.

Can I use Trellis from Claude or ChatGPT?

Yes. Trellis launched a Claude connector in May 2026 and added a ChatGPT plugin in August 2026. It is included in active subscriptions, and free accounts can use it up to a limit.

Does Trellis publish statutes or only court records?

Its API pages describe court records, rulings, verdicts and analytics. The connector can find trial court filings that cite a code section. The pages read do not describe an endpoint that returns statute text.

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.