Whilst there is no strict equivalent to the US PACER system in England & Wales courts, there are options to obtain court filings and further case information:
E-Filing (CE-File)
EFiling is being used across the following courts: Business and Property Courts (London Rolls Building since April 2017, B&PC's nationwide since April 2019), Queen's Bench Division (London RCJ, mandatory from 1 July 2019, except Admin). Senior Courts Costs Office: mandatory from Jan 2020. E-filing is due to be implemented in Admin Court and Court of Appeal and QB district registries in 2020 (as well as a number of other courts/tribunals, including EAT, Upper Tribunal Tax and Chancery, Central London County Court - High Court lists only). It is not known if eFiling will be implemented in the Supreme Court.
- If you have the action number of a case, you can search for the case to view the filings and request office copies of documents filed - charges for the document(s) will be listed against each entry. If a document has been filed electronically, it should be available immediately. If it needs to be scanned in, this can take up to 3 working days but may be as quick as 24 hours.
- The CE-File home page says that HMCTS are no longer charging a fee for the public search feature on CE-File and there are (at the time of writing, August 2020) no plans to re-introduce this fee.
- Useful info: Guide to running public searches on E-Filing. You need a username and password.
Lawtel Pending Actions
Lawtel has a service in the 'Cases' section called 'Pending Actions' where you can search for claims issued in the High Court since January 2010. Information is added after Acknowledgement of Service has been filed. Can only obtain claim form and particulars - not all filings - but it will mean you get the action number. Does not cover Admin court.
Court of Appeal tracker
This service won't give you filings - Court of Appeal is not due to move to e-Filing (above) until 2020. But you can see the status of the appeal.
Third party services
CRO Info and GlobalX both offer a court docket search on PAYG or subscription basis.
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Comments (8)
Anneli Sarkanen said
at 2:28 pm on Nov 25, 2009
A discussion of obtaining UK court documents (and European ones) is in this blog post here: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2009/05/access-to-court-records-in-the-uk-and-europe.html which may be of interest...
Anneli Sarkanen said
at 2:07 pm on Mar 1, 2010
[Comment from another user]: Regarding costs of obtaining UK "court filings" see:
http://www.legalweek.com/legal-week/news/1561657/plan-charge-gbp350-supreme-court-documents-met-criticism
Hester Swift said
at 2:42 pm on Nov 28, 2011
Interesting! Questions about this come up regularly, so I will refer to this entry in future.
Elaine Wintle said
at 4:53 pm on Dec 12, 2011
The Supreme Court website has a sample electronic bundle here:
http://www.supremecourt.gov.uk/docs/electronic_bundle_sample.pdf
Ian Hunter said
at 3:20 pm on Apr 30, 2012
if anyone has experience of Court Serve please comment, thanks.
Anneli Sarkanen said
at 4:21 pm on Apr 30, 2012
I've used CourtServe but only to search the Cause Lists for Crown Courts... I came across http://www.thelawpages.com/ recently which seems to have similar court lists on it, but useful as you can search across historical ones.
Elaine Wintle said
at 4:16 pm on May 3, 2012
The chambers I work has a CourtServe 2000 for the clerks - benefit is probably that the lists are then supplied to automatically just after publication and are stored and can be linked with case management/diary systems - very useful if there are any changes of date/location.
Elaine Wintle said
at 9:23 am on Jul 6, 2015
There was an interesting article in the Guardian for Saturday 4 July 2015 on the difficulties that individuals (without subscriptions to Bloomberg or Lawtel) would have in trying to obtain court documents:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/04/gove-two-nation-justice-legal-aid-court-records-technology-america
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