# Case watchlist board for tracking court dockets in one place

> Track every case your team follows on one board, see which filings are new since you last looked, and share the important ones to Slack.

- Workflow type: app
- Services: CourtListener, Slack
- Categories: Operations
- Published: 2026-08-17

## What it does

- One board with a card per case your team follows, showing the court, docket number, date filed and the newest activity, with anything that landed since your last visit flagged as new.
- Add cases by searching public court records from inside the app and pinning them to a shared team watchlist, with a court filter to narrow the search.
- Open any case for a chronological timeline of every filing, order and motion, plus the briefs and exhibits attached to them, each with a one-line plain-language summary.
- Mark entries reviewed, assign a case to a teammate, keep a private note on the matter, and post a short summary of any filing straight to a Slack channel.

## What you'll need

- A free CourtListener account, which is the public archive of U.S. court records run by the Free Law Project
- A Slack workspace, if you want the share button
- The cases, parties or docket numbers your team is tracking
- A sense of how you group work, by client or by matter, so the board matches how the team thinks

## Prompt

Build me a case watchlist workspace for my litigation team, so we work out of one screen instead of checking dockets one by one. It is a working surface for browsing, triage and shared state, not an alerting tool. Nothing runs on a schedule.

The main view is a board of the cases we track. Each card shows the case name, the court, the docket number, the date filed, and the newest docket entries on that case. Anything that arrived since the current user last opened that case is flagged as new, so store a per-user last-opened timestamp for each case and compare it against the entry dates. Let me group the board by matter or by client, with a selector to switch, and keep groups collapsible so a firm tracking thirty cases sees only what changed. Sort so cases with new activity float to the top of their group, and put a visible last checked timestamp on every card.

I add a case by searching CourtListener from inside the app. Use Search for free-text lookups across dockets and RECAP filings and List Dockets for direct docket lookups by case name, party or docket number. Build the court filter dropdown from List Courts, and cache that court list since it rarely changes. Result rows show case name, court, docket number and date filed, with a pin button that adds the case to the watchlist. Store pinned cases in app storage scoped to the team, keyed by docket id, so every member of the team sees the same watchlist.

Opening a case gives me a chronological timeline of every filing, order and motion. Use Get Docket for the case header metadata and List Docket Entries for the entries themselves. For each entry, pull the linked briefs and exhibits archived from PACER with List RECAP Documents and show them nested under the entry with links to the archived documents. Give every entry a one-line plain-language summary written from the entry description, so I can tell a scheduling order from a dispositive motion at a glance without opening anything.

Respect the CourtListener rate limits, which are 5 requests per minute, 50 per hour and 125 per day per token. All three apply at once. The board must never fan out one request per case on load. Render the board entirely from stored and cached data, and fetch docket entries lazily only when a card is expanded or a case is opened. Cache whatever was fetched alongside the timestamp it was fetched at. Offer a manual refresh on a single case, and a refresh-all that queues cases sequentially with pacing rather than firing them in parallel. If a request comes back throttled with a 429, show a calm try again shortly state and the Retry-After wait rather than an error.

Docket entry lists come back in the standard envelope with count, next, previous and results. Page by following the returned next URL rather than building pagination URLs yourself. When a case is opened, load the most recent page of entries first and offer a load more control for older history.

Team actions on top of the case data. I can mark an entry as reviewed, which records who reviewed it and when and is visible to everyone on the team, so two people never triage the same filing twice. I can assign a case to a teammate, shown on the card and filterable on the board. I can write a private matter note that stays attached to the case and is editable from the case view. Store all of this in app storage keyed by team alongside the pinned case record.

A Share to Slack button on any selected filing opens a channel picker built from Slack List Channels and posts a short summary with Slack Send a Message. The post should include the case name, the court, the docket number, the entry date and number, the one-line plain-language summary, and a link to the filing, formatted for Slack. Remember the last channel used and offer it as the default next time.

## How to customize

- Change how the board groups cases, by client, by matter, or by the teammate the case is assigned to.
- Pick which Slack channel the share button defaults to, and what the shared summary includes.
- Decide how much case history loads when you open a case, and how far back the timeline reaches.

## FAQ

### Does this replace PACER?

No. It reads the free public archive of PACER filings, so most federal case activity shows up without running up a PACER bill. Very recent or never-archived documents may not be there yet, so it is a triage surface rather than a system of record.

### Will it alert me the moment a new filing lands?

No, and that is deliberate. This is a working screen, not an alert feed. It shows you what changed on each case since you last opened it and gives you a refresh button, which also keeps you inside the daily limits the public records service allows.

### Can my whole team share one watchlist?

Yes. The watchlist, the reviewed marks and the case assignments are shared across the team, so two people never review the same filing twice. The matter note stays private to your team as well.

### Does CourtListener cost anything?

Accounts are free. There is a cap on how many requests a free account can make each day, which is why the app loads full case detail only when you open a case and shows a last checked time on every card.

### Does it cover state courts as well as federal?

Coverage is strongest for federal courts, because the filing archive is built from the federal PACER system. State court coverage varies by court, so search for a case first to confirm it is available before adding it to the board.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/case-watchlist-board-for-tracking-court-dockets-in-one-place