PACER
PACER alerts
PACER is where you go to look. It is not a service that tells you when something happens. If you are waiting to hear about a filing, you are waiting for something PACER does not send.
Check your case without a PACER login
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
How federal filing notices actually work
- PACER is public access to court records: you search, you read, you pay per page under the fee schedule the judiciary publishes. Check pacer.uscourts.gov for the current fees, which change.
- Electronic filing notices are the emails a court sends when a document is filed. They go to the registered filers in that case. Attorneys of record get them. Someone representing themselves usually does not, unless the district has let them register.
- Nobody else is watching your case for you. Not the court, not the clerk, and not the other side.
This is the whole gap. A case can sit quiet for six weeks and then move twice in three days, and the only way to know without being told is to keep opening the docket.
What CaseMagic does instead
It re-reads the docket on a schedule and tells you when an entry appears that it has not seen. It gives the case a permanent email address, so correspondence that never touches the docket is captured in the same record. And it keeps a Case Passport — one structured record of the matter — that your AI assistant can load when you ask about it.
Every answer carries the time the docket was last read. Nothing here is real time, and a service that claims otherwise about federal dockets is describing something it is not doing.
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
Does PACER send alerts?
PACER is the public access system for looking records up. The filing notices that go out automatically come from the courts’ electronic filing system and go to registered filers in that case. If you are not a registered filer, nothing arrives.
Do I still need PACER?
For reading a document that is not already in the free RECAP archive, yes. CaseMagic links to the free copy where one exists and tells you when there is not one, rather than pretending every filing is free to read.
Is CaseMagic affiliated with PACER or the federal judiciary?
No. CaseMagic is an independent service. It reads public docket data through CourtListener and its RECAP archive.
Will this cost me PACER fees?
Checking a case on CaseMagic costs you nothing and involves no PACER account of yours. If you then open a document that only exists behind PACER, that is between you and PACER.
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