DocketLayer Coverage Status: Full, Partial, and Planned

Resources  ·  Reference

Every court in the DocketLayer system carries one of three coverage values: full, partial, or planned. That value determines what a query returns — and whether a court accepts queries at all. It's the first thing worth understanding before you build against a specific jurisdiction.

Full Coverage

A court with full coverage delivers everything its public portal makes available. When you query a case at a full-coverage court, the response includes the complete docket entry history, all available case metadata, and filing activity across every case type the court exposes publicly.

Full coverage reflects the scope of the source portal, not a ceiling DocketLayer imposes. For US federal courts, that source is PACER and CM/ECF. For state and Canadian courts, it's each jurisdiction's public electronic filing system. If a source portal doesn't expose certain records — sealed filings, juvenile proceedings, records under a protective order — those records won't appear in the response either. DocketLayer surfaces the public record completely — we don't manufacture access that doesn't exist.

DocketLayer currently has full coverage for all 203 US federal courts.

On the Canadian side, ten courts carry full coverage: all three federal courts (Federal Court, Federal Court of Appeal, Tax Court of Canada) and seven provincial courts including the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal for British Columbia, the Court of King's Bench and Court of Appeal of Manitoba, the Court of King's Bench and Court of Appeal of New Brunswick, and the Court of Appeal for Ontario.

Partial Coverage

Partial coverage means the integration is live and queries succeed, but the scope is bounded. The boundary always comes from what the source portal makes publicly accessible — not from an arbitrary DocketLayer restriction. In practice, partial coverage usually means one of three things:

• Certain case types are available (civil records, for instance) but others are not (criminal, family, or probate)
• Records are available only from a specific date forward, based on when electronic filing was introduced in that jurisdiction
• Only a subset of courts within a jurisdiction is covered, because not every county or circuit has a public electronic docket

Queries to partial-coverage courts return a standard 200 response and cost $0.99. The coverage field in the court record reads partial, and the notes field describes the specific limitation for that court. Reading the notes before querying saves you from misinterpreting a thin response as a data error — it's just the scope of what the portal exposes.

Planned Coverage

Planned coverage means the court is registered in the system and the scraper is built, but the court is not yet open for queries. Querying a planned court returns a 422 — the court is recognized, but no data will be returned. There is no charge on a 422 response.

Courts carry planned status for one of two reasons. The more common is a pending commercial access agreement: Texas (37 courts) requires approval from the state's Office of Court Administration before DocketLayer can serve results, and Quebec's two superior courts (qc_cs and qc_ca) require a formal data agreement with SOQUIJ. The second reason is that an integration is technically complete but not yet activated for production — usually while final validation is in progress.

Planned status is transitional. When a pending agreement resolves, coverage activates and the court moves to partial or full depending on what the portal supports. Both Texas and Quebec are fully built; they're waiting on paper, not engineering.

Checking a Court's Status

GET /v2/status is free and returns the complete court list. Every court record includes its current coverage value, a notes field describing any limitations, and the case_id_format specifying the exact case number pattern that court expects. Calling it before you build against a new jurisdiction takes ten seconds and prevents a class of errors that are otherwise hard to distinguish from actual data problems.

curl https://api.docketlayer.ai/v2/status

For a browsable view of every court with its code, coverage status, and portal link, see the Court Directory.

Court codes follow a consistent pattern. Federal courts use standard abbreviations: nysd for the Southern District of New York, cacd for the Central District of California. State and Canadian courts use a two-letter jurisdiction prefix and a court-type suffix: bc_sc for the Supreme Court of British Columbia, on_ca for the Court of Appeal for Ontario. The full list is in the status response.

What Coverage Affects

Coverage status affects what a query returns, not how you make the request. The query structure is identical whether a court is full or partial — same endpoint, same parameters, same payment flow. The difference surfaces in the response.

Full and partial courts return 200 with data. Planned courts return 422 with no charge. Beyond the binary of data vs. no data, a partial-coverage court may return fewer docket entries, a narrower historical window, or a subset of case types compared to a full-coverage court — even for the same case, if the underlying portal imposed those limits before DocketLayer began indexing it.

The practical implication for builders: for workflows where completeness matters — litigation monitoring, compliance systems, anything where a missing filing has real consequences — read the notes field of the relevant court record in /v2/status before assuming the response represents the full record. Full coverage in DocketLayer means full access to the public record as the court's portal defines it. That's the right guarantee to build against, and it's a stronger one than most legal data sources provide.