Articles Tagged: documentation


New Range and Numerical Search Filters Home in on Relevant Results

Docket Alarm is excited to announce new search features that make finding relevant cases easier than ever before.

Range and numerical filters allow you to search by specifying ranges of the number of parties, firms, or attorneys involved in a case. These filters function the same way as other filters by paring down results to only the most relevant.

For example, you can use a numerical range filter to find large class action lawsuits using the party number filter.

Filtering Search Results by Title Now Available

We've been busy at Docket Alarm evaluating your product improvement requests and implementing time-saving changes while conducting your legal research. One new small but powerful refinement that will help you narrow your search is an ability to filter by title. Here is what we mean.

When you perform a search for say, "Apple v. Samsung" you get results for all dockets containing these keywords anywhere in the docket text. While this type of broad search may help you start with a bird's eye overview, sometimes you may want to narrow the results to just docket titles that contain this text.

So where is this feature located? In the search bar you'll notice a gear icon just before the court drop down menu.

Easier Than Ever to Access U.S. Courts and PACER with an API

Docket Alarm is proud to announce the release of an API client library to access court documents on PACER. An API allows software developers to build programs that access data in a structured way.

Docket Alarm Offers Powerful Analytics to Make Search Smarter


The days of conducting legal research in a vacuum are numbered. The latest developments in search utilize sophisticated full-text search engines in conjunction with big data analytics to give attorneys insight into the relationships between the many facets of litigation. Docket Alarm is helping to pave the way by offering a proprietary analytics platform in addition to a robust legal research engine.


Docket Alarm’s proprietary analytics add context and perspective to legal research.

Automatically Track Lawsuits (so you don't have to)


A major challenge facing firms and in-house legal departments is staying abreast of new lawsuits relevant to their clients and respective practice areas. Most firms employ paralegals to constantly check the court docket, while others have created their own platform by piecing together various services and tools. Not enough are taking advantage of readily available solutions.


Google Alerts: Information Overload

One such tool favored by many is Google’s “Alerts” feature, which allows an individual to enter a keyword or phrase as they would if conducting a search, and receive updates on that information.

Using Docket Alarm to Research an Expert on PACER



In high stakes litigation, an expert’s testimony can be determinative of the outcome of a case. It is of the utmost importance to ensure your expert is not only qualified and experienced in their area of expertise, but has offered credible testimony in past litigation

Using Docket Alarm, you can quickly search for a particular individual and find all of their litigation history in the US Court PACER database. Using terms and connectors, you can conduct a search of PACER dockets and documents that leverages the relationship between the expert’s name and keywords indicative of the expert’s credibility.

Terms and Connectors Searching With Docket Alarm

Docket Alarm can conduct natural language searches and terms and connectors searches. Searching with natural language is easy, just type what you’re looking for and we’ll find the most relevant documents.

Terms and connectors searching provides a high level of precision that can help narrow down search results. Docket Alarm supports many terms and connectors, including Boolean, proximity, stemming, wildcard, and phrase searches.

Below is a summary of Docket Alarm’s connectors:
Connector
Description
Example
AND

default
Find documents containing all connected terms.

The New Resource for All Things PACER


Part important public resource, part anachronistic PDF filing cabinet, PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is outdated at best and downright primitive at worst.