owlabee

Government and public records

PACER RSS Feeds: Monitor New Federal Court Filings

Federal district and bankruptcy courts running CM/ECF can publish a free RSS feed of their last 24 hours of docket activity, and so can the Court of Federal Claims, the Court of International Trade and some courts of appeals. This Actor reads those feeds for the courts you choose, normalizes each entry, filters it, and on scheduled runs keeps only entries that are new since the last run. No PACER account is needed.

Open the Actor on Apify Store

PACER RSS Docket Monitor — New Federal Court Filings. Pay per result; see the Store page for current pricing.

The source and its limits

The feeds are the courts' own public endpoints, https://ecf.<court>.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rss_outside.pl (and …/n/beam/servlet/TransportRoom?servlet=RSSGenerator for the courts of appeals). Each entry has the case number, the case title (the lead parties), the docket text, the document number with a link, and the filing time. Documents are linked, never downloaded; opening a document on PACER is subject to PACER's own fees.

Coverage differs per court. The registry lists 203 courts, and 143 had a live feed at their last probe:

  • District and bankruptcy courts (sweep of 2026-10-17): of 188, 94 published every entry type, 41 published a subset (typically complaints, motions and orders), 23 answered with no entries, and 30 did not answer datacenter requests.
  • Court of Federal Claims and Court of International Trade (probe of 2026-11-07): both live. Court of International Trade feed titles carry only the case number, so party filters cannot match there.
  • Courts of appeals (probe of 2026-11-07): 6 of 13 had entries. Appellate feeds carry orders, opinions and judgments only, never new appeals, so they are for following an appeal you already know about; newCasesOnly drops every appellate entry.

The Actor still tries every court you name and reports what happened. The full list is on PACER RSS feeds by court.

For past dockets, the optional historical pass reads the RECAP archive through the Free Law Project's CourtListener API, in the same record shape with source: "courtlistener-recap".

Limits worth knowing

  • Each feed covers the trailing 24 hours only. Schedule at least daily; hourly is a good default, since courts regenerate feeds every 30 to 60 minutes.
  • Nature of suit, party lists, judges and the full docket text are not in the feeds. The case title carries only the lead parties, so a party that is not first-named may be missing.
  • entryTypes is a heuristic over the entry text; use entryKeywords for precision.
  • The CourtListener API allows 5 requests per minute, 50 per hour and 125 per day by default, shared by anonymous callers; a free CourtListener token gives a run its own allowance.

Fields you get

FieldWhat it holds
court, courtName, courtType, stateCM/ECF court code and name; district, bankruptcy, appellate or national (state is null for the last two)
caseNumber, caseNumberShort, caseTitle, caseTypeCase as published, a normalized number, the lead parties, and civil, criminal, bankruptcy and so on
entryText, entryCategoryDocket text and a heuristic category (complaint, petition, motion, order …)
documentNumber, documentUrl, docketUrlDocument number and links to the document and docket on PACER
bankruptcyChapter, trustee, officeBankruptcy entries only
filedAt, pubDateRawFiling time, and the original timestamp string
likelyNewCase, matchedFilters, isNewDocument number 1, which filters matched, and the monitor-mode flag
source, recapUrlpacer-rss or courtlistener-recap

Example output

One docket entry from the Southern District of New York (from the Actor's README):

{
  "recordType": "docket-entry",
  "entryId": "nysd:663583:517",
  "court": "nysd",
  "courtName": "U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York",
  "courtType": "district",
  "state": "NY",
  "caseNumber": "1:26-cv-03810",
  "caseNumberShort": "26-cv-3810",
  "caseTitle": "First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company v. Patriot Bank, N.A.",
  "caseType": "civil",
  "bankruptcyChapter": null,
  "entryText": "Certificate of Service Other",
  "entryCategory": "notice",
  "documentNumber": 153,
  "documentUrl": "https://ecf.nysd.uscourts.gov/doc1/127140563915?caseid=663583&de_seq_num=517",
  "docketUrl": "https://ecf.nysd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/DktRpt.pl?663583",
  "filedAt": "2026-10-17T07:34:33.000Z",
  "likelyNewCase": false,
  "matchedFilters": [
    "party:Patriot Bank"
  ],
  "isNew": true,
  "source": "pacer-rss",
  "recapUrl": null,
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-17T10:22:00.283Z"
}

Use cases

New cases naming a company

Combine partyKeywords, entryTypes: ["complaint"] and newCasesOnly to catch a new case opened against or by a company in the courts you watch.

Chapter 11 filings

Watch deb and nysb with bankruptcyChapters: ["11"] and onlyNewSinceLastRun on an hourly schedule.

Follow one case

Pass caseNumbers to get every new motion and order in a case without checking the docket by hand.

How to run it

You need an Apify account and its API token (Console → Settings → API & Integrations). Each run is billed per result to your account; set a maximum total charge for the run to cap spend.

With curl

The sync endpoint starts a run, waits up to 300 seconds and returns the dataset items. New Chapter 11 entries in the Delaware and Southern District of New York bankruptcy courts, new since the last run:

export APIFY_TOKEN=<your Apify API token>

curl -sS -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/owlabee~pacer-docket-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${APIFY_TOKEN}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "courts": [
    "deb",
    "nysb"
  ],
  "bankruptcyChapters": [
    "11"
  ],
  "maxEntriesPerCourt": 25,
  "maxResults": 25,
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "stateStoreName": "pacer-chapter-11-de-sdny-monitor",
  "notifyOnlyOnResults": true
}'

From an AI agent (MCP)

Apify hosts an MCP server. This config exposes only this Actor to the agent:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "owlabee-pacer-docket-monitor": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=owlabee/pacer-docket-monitor",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer ${APIFY_TOKEN}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Then ask, for example: Every hour, check the Delaware and SDNY bankruptcy courts for new Chapter 11 filings and give me the case title, entry text and docket link.

Python, Node.js and more examples

Runnable curl.sh, python.py, node.mjs and mcp.json files for this Actor are in examples/pacer-docket-monitor on GitHub.

No code: Zapier, Make or n8n

Apify's official apps on these platforms can run this Actor and pass its results on. Step-by-step recipes: Get New PACER Docket Entries in Slack with Zapier.

FAQ

Do I need a PACER account?

No. The RSS feeds are public, unauthenticated endpoints. Only opening a linked document on PACER is subject to PACER's fees.

How far back does it go?

The live feeds cover 24 hours. Turn on includeHistorical to also read dockets from the last 1 to 365 days in the RECAP archive. That needs a free CourtListener API token in courtListenerApiKey, since the CourtListener API no longer answers anonymous requests.

Why does the same entry appear twice?

Some courts attach two event labels to one entry. Both are published with the same entryId; entryKey tells them apart.

Can I get the judge or all parties?

Not from the feed. Open docketUrl on PACER. Historical RECAP records do include parties, nature of suit and the assigned judge when the archive has them.

What if a court's feed is down?

That court produces one error item and the run continues with the others.

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