Docket alerts
Court docket alerts
Being told when something is filed is the easy part. Keeping one record of the case that is still useful six months later is the part everything else gets wrong.
Check the case you want alerts on
United States federal district courts — all 94 districts, including the territorial district courts. State, county and municipal courts are not supported yet.
No account needed to checkFederal courtsResults in seconds
What a docket alert is worth, honestly
Raw federal docket alerts are available cheaply, and in some places free. Anyone selling you $99 docket alerts is selling you something you can get for less. So CaseMagic does not sell docket alerts.
What is worth paying for is the thing an alert cannot do: hold the whole case. The docket entry that arrived this morning, the email opposing counsel sent last week, the attachment that came with it, the judge, the deadlines you were told about, the filings themselves — in one record that is still there in March when you cannot remember what happened in January, and that your AI assistant can load in one call.
Alert versus case record
| A docket alert | CaseMagic | |
|---|---|---|
| Tells you the docket moved | Yes | Yes |
| Keeps the case history in one place | No — it is a stream of notifications | Yes — the Case Passport |
| Captures correspondence that never reaches the docket | No | Yes — CaseMail |
| Loads into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok | No | Yes — one MCP endpoint |
| Costs nothing to look a case up | Varies | Yes, always |
What is free and what is paid
Everything about the past is free. Everything about the future is paid. Checking a case costs nothing and needs no account.
Free, every time
- the case caption, court and case number
- the assigned and referred judges
- filing date, status, cause of action and nature of suit
- the total number of docket entries
- the five most recent docket entries with their real text
- a link to the free copy of a filing where one exists
- the time the docket was last checked
What a subscription adds
- continuous monitoring, so you are told about new activity instead of checking
- a permanent CaseMail address for the case
- the Case Passport, which accumulates docket activity and correspondence together
- access from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and other MCP-capable assistants
A free check reads the court source and then serves the same answer for 15 minutes. A watched case is re-checked about every 6 hours. Nothing here is real time, and every result carries the time it was last checked.
Pricing
Every plan includes Watch, CaseMail, the Case Passport and AI access. 7-day free trial, card required, cancel any time.
Individual
$99/month
1 monitored matter. One monitored matter.
Professional
$299/month
Up to 10 monitored matters. For a small practice with several active matters.
Practice
$599/month
Up to 50 monitored matters. For a firm running a full docket.
Questions people ask before they start
Are free docket alerts good enough?
For one case, if all you want is a notification when the docket moves, often yes — and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Free alerts stop being enough when the case has correspondence outside the docket, when you are running several matters, or when you want an AI assistant to load the whole case on request.
Does CaseMagic email me, or do I have to check?
CaseMagic watches the case for you. The point of the product is that you stop checking.
Can I get alerts for a case I am not a party to?
Yes. A federal civil docket is public, and monitoring one does not require you to be in the case.
Does the court itself send alerts?
Federal courts send electronic filing notices to registered filers in the case. If you are not one — and most self-represented litigants are not — the court is not emailing you anything, which is exactly the gap this fills.
Using it from an AI assistant
The same lookup and the same monitoring are available inside the assistant you already use. How that works · ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini · Grok