Retrieve federal court docket entries and documents via the PACER and CourtListener (RECAP) APIs

Steps

1. Register for a PACER account at pacer.uscourts.gov; PACER charges per-page fees for document access — budget accordingly and prefer CourtListener/RECAP for already-fetched public documents.
2. Use the CourtListener REST API (free, no charge per document) to search for cases via GET https://www.courtlistener.com/api/rest/v3/dockets/?court=&case_name= and retrieve docket entries via the docket entries endpoint.
3. For documents not yet in RECAP, use the PACER Case Locator (PCL) or court-specific CM/ECF query endpoints to search by case number, party name, or date range; authenticate with your PACER credentials via HTTP Basic Auth on each court's CM/ECF endpoint.
4. Download individual documents from CM/ECF using the document link obtained from docket entries; each PDF retrieval incurs PACER fees — deduplicate to avoid re-fetching already downloaded documents.
5. Contribute fetched documents back to RECAP via the CourtListener REST API (POST /api/rest/v3/recap/) to make them freely available and exempt from future PACER fees for other users.
6. Parse docket entry text using NLP to extract event types (hearing, order, motion filed), parties, and dates for downstream alerting or case tracking.