Justia, the company that developed the popular Blawgsearch engine, has just introduced another outstanding search vehicle — a website that allows the user to track federal court cases in a number of different ways, including by date, state or party name.
The website taps into a database of recently filed federal district court civil cases and starts with a list of all of the cases, which then can be broken down by State/Court/Practice/Sub-Practice. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all of the new cases that meet these criteria, or you can do a search and subscribe to an RSS fee of the search results. For example, you could track all of the federal court cases filed against a particular company as an RSS feed, or you could subscribe to just those that are filed in Texas. Whatever the search criteria, you can track new cases with an RSS feed.
Each case has an individual page with a link to the Pacer info page (you do need a subscription to access these documents at 8 cents per page) as well as Blog, News, Finance and Web searches on the party names. Not a bad way of picking up some quick informal discovery on the parties to litigation.
Justia has inputted over 300,000 case titles since January 1, 2006 and are now updating the database daily. The website is still in beta and Justia plans to add more functionality and editorial groupings of parties. But it’s pretty darn useful already. Give it a look.