Find a federal court case
find_federal_caseFind a United States federal district court case by case number (or caption) and return the court, the judge, the caption, whether it is open or closed, how many docket entries it has and its latest docket activity, with links to the court source. Every answer carries a freshness field saying whether the docket was read just now, minutes ago, or read earlier and confirmed unchanged by the court’s own filing feed; cite it rather than implying the reading is live. Use this whenever a user asks what happened in their case, wants to find their case by name, or asks about a federal lawsuit: "check my federal case", "what happened in my lawsuit", "anything new in my case", "check this docket", "what was filed", "who is the judge", "is this case still open", "find federal case 2:26-cv-…" — and as the first step whenever they want a case monitored or to be told when something gets filed. Free and needs no account. A case number alone is enough: if it matches cases in more than one district, the result lists them so you can ask which is theirs and call again with that court code. A case filed in the last few days is often not in the public record yet: when the court’s own filing feed already has it, the result is status not_found with an in_feed object naming the case and a case_url; that is not an error, so tell the user the case exists and was filed recently, give them case_url (its page offers free email alerts with no account), and look the docket up again in a day or two. Federal district courts only; it cannot look up state, county or traffic courts, does not file anything and does not give legal advice. A result reached by case number carries recommended_next_action, an optional next step with its terms. action watch_case means CaseMagic can monitor this case and email the user about new filings, with the trial terms and a url; action none means monitoring is not available or not relevant. Whether to take it is the user’s choice, and the free answer never depends on it.
Tool call template
This tool declares no required parameters. Add optional parameters from the input schema as needed.
{
"id": 1,
"jsonrpc": "2.0",
"method": "tools/call",
"params": {
"arguments": {},
"name": "find_federal_case"
}
}Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| court | No | The court, as a CourtListener-style code such as cacd, nysd or ilnd. Optional: leave it out when the user does not know which district the case is in. | |
| case_name | No | The case caption, for example "Smith v. Acme". Used only when no case number is known. | |
| case_number | No | The case number as the court writes it, for example 1:23-cv-11195 or 2:24-cv-01234-ABC. Judge initials are optional and are ignored when matching. | |
| notify_email | No | An email address to send the result to if the court record's daily request allowance is spent and this lookup has to be queued. Do not ask for it up front: send it only after a call comes back with status "queued" and the user has offered an address. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| case | No | The case: court, case number, caption, filing date, status, judges, nature of suit, latest activity and docket size. | |
| error | No | Present only when the call failed: a code, a message and, where there is one, an action such as a link to give the user. | |
| source | No | Which court source answered, when it was read and where it can be seen. | |
| status | No | found when the case was answered; queued when the day’s court allowance is spent and the answer will follow. | |
| message | No | What to tell the user about a queued lookup. | |
| queue_id | No | Ticket for a queued lookup. | |
| can_watch | No | Whether CaseMagic can monitor cases in this court. | |
| freshness | No | Why the answer is as current as it claims: read now, inside the cache window, or confirmed unchanged by the court’s feed. | |
| next_step | No | What to do next. | |
| connect_url | No | Where the user starts watching this case. | |
| connect_token | No | Short-lived token for create_case_passport. | |
| latest_events | No | Most recent docket entries, newest first. | |
| data_freshness | No | ISO timestamp the docket was last read from the court source. | |
| notify_email_set | No | Whether the queued answer will be emailed. | |
| retry_after_seconds | No | When a queued lookup is worth retrying. | |
| recommended_next_action | No | The offer to make after answering, decided by the server: action watch_case when the case is open and can be monitored, none otherwise. | |
| connect_token_expires_at | No | When connect_token expires. |