Litigation & Bankruptcy Search

Users can now use the business_id of any business to initiate a search for litigations & bankruptcies using our new APIs!

1. Initial Docket Search

To start a litigation & bankruptcy search, simply make a POST request to /docket_searches using the business's UUID. We will search for and return up to 50 recent Litigations & Bankruptcies. Additionally, we often find Trademarks and Patent Application history.

After initializing the search, we emit a DocketSearch.submitted webhook event. to indicate that a Litigation & Bankruptcy search has commenced. Upon completion, we emit a DocketSearch.completed webhook event.

In addition to the webhooks, one can also retrieve all Litigations and Bankruptcies through GET /docket_searches/{search_request_id}

2. Retrieving Docket Details

After the initial dockets are retrieved, you may want to learn more about a specific docket, such as viewing docket case history. To see details for a given docket, you must order them explicitly. This can be done using the docket_id and ordering the details with PUT /dockets/{docket_id}/details. The response from ordering docket details will return results from our cache by default. However, if you wish to get the most up-to-date details, you will need to order docket details from the court system itself by setting the param from_court to true.

Initializing a request for docket details will emit a DocketDetailsSearch.submitted webhook event. Once the search for docket details completes, a DocketDetailsSearch.completed webhook event will be emitted.

To retrieve the results, there are three options. You can either:

• Retrieve the entire array of dockets using the one of the options in Part 1
• Use GET /dockets/{docket_id}/details to retrieve the specifics for an individual docket_id.
• Or use GET /docket_searches/details/{docket_details_request_id} to retrieve the specifics for an individual docket by the docket details request id.

Docket details sometimes include documents which may or may not be available for download. To retrieve a document with is_available = False you must also order the document explicitly from the court system.

If a docket exhibit is available is_available = True the document can downloaded using GET /dockets/exhibits/{docket_exhibit_id}

3. Ordering from Court Directly

Both PUT /dockets/{docket_id}/details and PUT /dockets/exhibits/{docket_exhibit_id} allow you to order update for docket details and docket exhibits from the court system directly using the boolean parameter from_court. Depending on the court system, this may involve extra PACER fees, which are passed through directly.

Smaller court systems often have fairly brittle APIs, so ordering from the court system directly can be prone to failure.