List North Carolina (NC) court cases filed by case type, county and date
list_cases_filedWhat was FILED — every case of a given type in a county over a date range.
Answers "what IF cases were filed in Surry County yesterday?", "show me the estate
cases opened in Wake this week", "how many civil suits were filed in Mecklenburg on
Monday?". This is the DOCKET axis. The other searches are name axes — use
search_cases_by_party / _business / _attorney when you know WHO, and this when
you know WHAT and WHEN.
EVERY ROW NOW CARRIES case_status, with no enrich needed — so do not call
lookup_court_case merely to find out whether a case is open or closed.
The returned text is FINER-GRAINED than the four filter values: alongside "Pending"
and "Disposed" you will see "Disposed - Voluntary Dismissal", "Disposed - Dismissal
on Order of the Court", "Disposed - Clerk of Superior Court" — i.e. HOW it ended, not
just that it did. So never test it with equality against the filter vocabulary
(status == "Disposed" misses most disposed rows); match on a prefix, and quote the
portal's own wording when you report it.
date_start/date_end are the FILED date, not a hearing date. A case filed in
2023 can have a hearing today — for "who is in court today", use
get_attorney_hearing_calendar. Accepts YYYY-MM-DD, or the words "today" and
"yesterday" (resolved in North Carolina (NC) time).
Defaults to YESTERDAY, not today, when no date is given, and says so in
date_note. Today's filings are still being keyed in by clerks, so a "today" answer
is a partial set that reads like a complete one.
case_type is a case-number PREFIX, not a type code. CR also returns CRS;
CV also returns CVD and CVM. Read case_type_breakdown before reporting a
count as "42 CR cases" — some of them may be CRS.
Common types: IF infraction (traffic), CR/CRS criminal, CV/CVD/CVM civil,
E estate, SP special proceeding, M civil misc. judgment (liens, lis pendens).
Completeness. The portal caps a search at 200 cases; this splits the query by
date and case-number prefix to get past that. If truncated is true the count is a
LOWER BOUND, and incomplete_prefixes names the exact buckets that were not
read — say what is missing rather than reporting the number as a total. The remedy
is a shorter date range or a county.
An empty result is a real answer, but only when the lookup succeeded. On an
upstream failure this returns an error; never report that as "nothing was filed".
county_filter: "server" means the county was applied by the portal itself before
its cap, and every row is additionally checked against the county code embedded in
its case number — so a county-filtered result here is exact, unlike the
location-substring filter the name searches use.
A date range is required (max 31 days) — an unbounded search cannot be completed. Read-only public record, North Carolina only. Informational, not legal advice.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | No | ||
| county | No | ||
| offset | No | ||
| date_end | No | ||
| case_type | Yes | ||
| date_start | No | ||
| case_status | No |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
No arguments | |||