JudyRecords: free court opinion search engine

JudyRecords is a 100% free nationwide search engine that lets you instantly search hundreds of millions of United States court cases and lawsuits. JudyRecords has over 100x more cases than Google Scholar and 10x more cases than PACER, the official case management system of the United States federal judiciary.As of Dec 2021, JudyRecords now features free full-text search of all United States patents from 1/1/1976 to 11/10/2021 — over 7.9 million patents in total.

Extended searches

The first 500K results are displayed instead of just the first 2K.

• murder – 757K cases
• fraud – 1.7 million cases
• burglary – 3.4 million cases
• assault – 7.3 million cases

Downloadable datasets

All Digitized Texas Appeals Court Cases Since 1900 (download Kaggle dataset)

Select upcoming datasources

• US Tax Court
• Minnesota Appeals Courts

Search tips

• Trigger name matching
  • Strict name matching (name + 3 commas)
    • first middle last,,,
    • first m last,,,
    • first last,,,
  • Lenient name matching (name + 2 commas)
    • first middle last,,
    • first m last,,
    • first last,,
  • Trying strict then lenient matching each using a full middle name often produces the most useful results.
    • 1st – donald john trump,,,
    • 2nd – donald john trump,,
  • If extra filtering is needed, additional qualifiers may be specified after the name part.
    • donald j trump,, texas
    • barack obama,, (“affordable care act” OR “aca”)
  • Sometimes both modes will produce the same results.
• Exact phrase
  • “economic loss rule”
  • “46.2-806”
  • “donald j trump”
• Exact phrase proximity
  • “donald j trump”~4 – allow those terms to be up to 4 words out of order.
    • Matches “donald j trump” but also “trump donald j”.
  • “trump casino”~5
    • Search for trump close to the word casino.
• Exclude
  • “donald trump” -florida
  • cnn.com -patent (exclude patents)
• AND/OR/NOT/()
  • “summary judgment” AND “employment discrimination”
  • (“donald j trump”~4) OR (“donald john trump”~4) OR (“donald trump”~3)
  • AND/OR/NOT must be uppercase.
  • AND/OR/NOT should generally be used with parentheses to ensure you get the expected results.
    • For example, (donald trump) OR (paul manafort) will produce the expected results. donald trump OR paul manafort will not, and will be logically interpreted as donald AND (trump OR paul) AND manafort, rather than the expected (donald AND trump) OR (paul AND manafort).
    • Combine with exact phrase proximity for better results: (“donald trump”~3) OR (“paul manafort”~3)
  • AND is the default operator implicitly used between terms.
    • For example, (“donald trump”~3) AND (“paul manafort”~3) is the same thing as “donald trump”~3 “paul manafort”~3.

To see the full article, click: Info-judyrecords

Posted by Marin Larkin, Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal.