Court record OSINT

Court records are dense. From a single state-court civil filing, an analyst typically pulls:

• Party name and address from the caption — petitioner and respondent both
• Attorney names and bar numbers
• Judge name, courtroom, hearing dates
• Witness names where they appear in transcripts or motions
• Co-defendant names from criminal filings, which build out a network map of who you've been associated with
• Property addresses from civil cases — divorce decrees often list every parcel and bank account

Federal PACER is a separate system covering federal civil, criminal, bankruptcy, and appellate cases. PACER is paywalled per page but still public. LexisNexis, Westlaw, and CourtListener republish federal cases. UniCourt and others do the same for state court. Brokers pick all of it up and label it "verified public records."

Search yourself across the court-record stack.

• Your state's court portal — most states have a public case search. Search your full legal name. Check civil and criminal indexes separately.
• PACER (pacer.uscourts.gov) — search "First Last" if you've ever been a federal party, witness, or affiant.
• CourtListener — federal opinions and dockets, free and indexed.
• UniCourt and Trellis (free tier) — state court aggregation, useful for cross-state.
• LexisNexis or Westlaw — if you have agency access through a prosecutor or legal department, run the same query.
• Google: "First Last" docket, "First Last" v., "First Last" case no.

Note every filing that includes your home address in the caption or in an exhibit. Note every cross-reference to a relative's name.

Court records are harder to scrub than broker pages but not impossible.

• Redaction at filing time. When you're a party to a new filing, ask counsel to redact the home address from the caption and from exhibits. Most courts allow the use of an alternate service address for protected categories. Some states require a judge's order.
• Sealing. For personal-life filings — divorce, custody, restraining orders where you're the protected party — request sealing under your state's rule. Standards vary. Sealing is not guaranteed but is granted more often than people assume.
• Confidentiality election. File the relevant state election so future filings default to a non-public address. Broker-removal statutes — Daniel's Law is the original (NJ's law that lets covered officers and judges sue brokers that won't remove their home address) — cover this in a growing number of states.
• PACER and federal. Federal Rule 5.2 redaction applies. If you're identified as a witness or victim in a sealed-by-default category, ensure the U.S. Attorney's office actually filed under seal.

See court records exposure for state-by-state guidance and the templates.

We handle the broker layer — the downstream pages that ingest court-record data and republish your home address inside a people-search result. A free scan shows which currently list the address.

The court-side requests — redaction, sealing, motions — are on you or your counsel. No third-party service can file a motion in your name. We give you the playbook at court records exposure and the broker layer takes care of itself once we're running. Together that's the full picture: source plus distribution.