Obtain a PACER session token by posting credentials to the PACER authentication API endpoint, capturing the token for use in subsequent request headers
Call the case summary endpoint for the target court's CM/ECF system with the case number to retrieve the docket header metadata including case title, presiding judge, and open/closed status
Call the docket report endpoint with the case number and an optional date range to retrieve the docket entries list, parsing each entry for its document number, filing date, docket text, and linked document IDs
Call the party and attorney endpoint to retrieve the full list of parties with their represented-by attorney details, bar numbers, and firm affiliations
Paginate through all docket entries using the API's pagination parameters, accumulating the full docket history, and store the structured data in a matter management system keyed by court and case number
Known gotchas
Each PACER page-unit of retrieved content is billed to the registered PACER account at the prevailing per-page rate (currently capped per document); automated bulk retrieval scripts can incur significant charges unexpectedly — always check whether the desired document is already freely available via the RECAP/CourtListener archive before hitting PACER directly
PACER CM/ECF REST API availability varies by court and by court type (district, bankruptcy, appellate); not all courts have migrated to the NextGen CM/ECF platform that exposes the REST API, and older courts require PACER SOAP or screen-scraping approaches
The PACER session token has a short expiration window; long-running batch jobs must refresh the token periodically and handle 401 responses by re-authenticating rather than failing the entire batch
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp