CourtDrive lets you find any federal case available on PACER. You have four (4) tools at your disposal:
The Omni Search is found at the top of every page. The other three are all available with 1-click from the left navigation. Below we explain which tool is the best for your specific need.
The Omni Search will search My Cases, Firm Cases, and all of CourtDrive, and present the top 10 matches that may exist for each category.
Enter a case name or number in the box, and the search will automatically run. Click the desired results, or scroll down to search further:
Clicking on the ‘search for [term]’ section after entering in a search term will take you to the Case Lookup section. This is present at the top of your search results.
The Case Lookup search tool is free, super fast, and very user friendly. Just start typing something and results will appear below the search fields:
Click PACER Search in the left navigation to access our PACER interface. Searches conducted here will search the PACER national case locator (NCL). In contrast to our Case Lookup, searches here will search 100% of the PACER NCL and incur PACER charges of 10 cents per search, even if no results are found.
Each federal court jurisdiction has its own database and search page. CourtDrive, through our Single Court Search, lets you access a single jurisdiction directly and search 100% of that jurisdiction. For example, you can search just Northern California Bankruptcy Court, or you can search just the Central California District Court. You cannot search more than one jurisdiction at a time using this page.
For Bankruptcy, Civil, Criminal and National jurisdictions, case number searching is free.
However, for Appellate cases, case number searching is Not Free.
If you want to search a single jurisdiction but do not have a case number, you can search using other criteria, but these searches are NOT free and may incur substantial PACER charges if too broad.
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