UK Courts and Tribunals Scraper

UK Courts and Tribunals Scraper

Scrape UK court judgments and tribunal decisions from Find Case Law, up to a million per run. Every case comes with its neutral citation, court, date, and full judgment text. No API key or registration. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML.

The UK's Find Case Law service publishes judgments from the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, and tribunals, but browsing and downloading them in bulk is manual work. This scraper reads the public search feed directly, letting you collect decisions by keyword, court, or date range, and returns each one in a consistent, flat schema. It is built for legal researchers, journalists, and data analysts who need the raw text of UK case law without writing their own parser.

Who uses it	What they scrape UK Courts and Tribunals for
Legal researchers	Building a corpus of judgments on a specific point of law for doctrinal analysis.
Journalists	Tracking judicial review outcomes or sentencing patterns across a court.
Data analysts	Extracting structured data from judgment text for quantitative legal research.
Law firms	Monitoring new decisions from a particular court or tribunal that affect their practice area.

What it does

This Actor collects UK court judgments and tribunal decisions from Find Case Law by search term, court filter, or latest listings, and returns each one as a flat row.

• 🔍 Free-text search: pass a query string to find cases mentioning specific terms, statutes, or party names.
• 🏛️ Court filter: restrict results to a single court or tribunal using its slug, such as ewca/civ for the Court of Appeal Civil Division.
• 📅 Date sorting: collect the newest decisions first, oldest first, or by relevance to your search term.
• 📦 Bulk collection: set a high maxItems to gather thousands of judgments in one run for large-scale analysis.

Results export to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML, or straight from the API.

What you can do with UK Courts and Tribunals data

📚 Build a legal research corpus.

A PhD researcher collects every Court of Appeal judgment mentioning a specific statute over five years, then runs thematic analysis on the full text.

📰 Investigate judicial trends.

A journalist scrapes all High Court judicial review decisions from the last quarter, filters by outcome, and identifies patterns in government defeats.

📊 Feed a legal analytics pipeline.

A data analyst runs the scraper weekly for new Employment Appeal Tribunal decisions, parses the text for cited cases, and builds a citation network graph.

🏢 Monitor practice-area developments.

A law firm sets a recurring run for the Chancery Division, collecting every new judgment to flag cases relevant to their clients within hours of publication.

Why choose this scraper

	What you get
No API key needed	Reads the public Find Case Law search feed with no registration or authentication.
Full judgment text	Returns the complete body of each decision, not a snippet or summary.
Fixed flat schema	Every case arrives as one row with the same fields, ready for your database or spreadsheet.
Court-level filtering	Target a specific court or tribunal so you only collect the decisions that matter to you.

How it compares

No other Store actor targets UK Courts and Tribunals the same way, so the honest comparison is with the alternatives teams actually weigh.

	UK Courts and Tribunals Scraper	Build it in-house	By hand
Setup	Run it now, zero config	Days of engineering	None, but hours per pull
When UK Courts and Tribunals changes	Maintained for you	You fix it	You re-learn the page
Proxies, retries, anti-bot	Built in	Your problem	Browser only
Output	Fixed JSON schema, CSV/Excel export	Whatever you build	Copy-paste
Cost	Pay per result	Engineering time	Analyst hours

Configure the run

Drive the Actor from a free-text query, a court slug, or leave both empty for the latest decisions across all courts, and set a maximum number of cases to collect per run. The Input tab lists every parameter.

A first run with the defaults:

{
 "maxItems": 10
}

A larger pull:

{
 "maxItems": 200
}

Pricing

Pay-per-result: $0.021 per result collected. You pay only for the results written to your dataset.

Results collected	Approximate cost
100 results	$2.10
1,000 results	$21.00
10,000 results	$210.00

New Apify accounts start with $5 in free credit.

Free users

Free-plan runs return up to 10 results as a preview. Upgrade your Apify plan to collect up to 1,000,000 results per run.

Run it

1. Create a free Apify account with $5 in credit.
2. Open the UK Courts and Tribunals Scraper.
3. Set your inputs and any filters, then click Start.
4. Export the results as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the Dataset tab.

Run it programmatically through the Apify API (run-sync-get-dataset-items) or the ApifyClient for JavaScript and Python.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Give an AI agent live access to UK Courts and Tribunals through the Model Context Protocol. Add the Actor to Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client:

claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=parseforge/uk-courts-tribunals-scraper"

Then prompt it in plain language to run the scraper and read back the results.

Troubleshooting

Why am I getting no results?

Check that your search query matches cases on Find Case Law. Try running without a query and without a court filter first to confirm the scraper works, then add your filters back one at a time. Also check that the court slug is typed exactly, including any slashes.

The scraper returns fewer cases than my maxItems setting.

The scraper stops when Find Case Law has no more results matching your query and court filter. If you expected more, try broadening your search term or removing the court filter to see the total available.

Some judgments are missing their full text.

A small number of judgments on Find Case Law have only a summary or are pending publication of the full text. The scraper returns whatever text is publicly available at the time of the run.

I get an error when using a court slug.

Court slugs are case-sensitive and must match the Find Case Law URL structure exactly. Common working examples are 'ewca/civ', 'ewhc/ch', 'ukut', and 'eat'. If a slug has changed, check the Find Case Law website for the current value.

The run is taking a long time.

Large maxItems values mean the scraper must paginate through many pages of results. This is normal. Reduce maxItems if you need faster runs, or let it complete for a complete dataset.

FAQ

Question	Answer
What is Find Case Law?	Find Case Law is a service run by The National Archives that provides public access to court judgments and tribunal decisions from the UK's superior courts and tribunals. It is the official free repository for British and Irish case law.
Which courts and tribunals does this scraper cover?	It covers all courts and tribunals available on Find Case Law, including the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court divisions, Upper Tribunal, Employment Appeal Tribunal, and more. You can filter by a specific court slug or leave it empty to search across all of them.
Do I need an API key or login?	No. The scraper reads the public search interface of Find Case Law, so there is no registration, no API key, and no authentication required.
Can I get the full text of each judgment?	Yes. The scraper returns the complete body text of each judgment or tribunal decision, not a summary or headnote.
How do I filter by a specific court?	Use the court slug field. For example, enter 'ewca/civ' for the Court of Appeal Civil Division, 'ewhc/ch' for the High Court Chancery Division, or 'ukut' for the Upper Tribunal. The description lists common slugs.
What does the search query field do?	It passes a free-text term to the Find Case Law search engine, matching against the full text of judgments. You can search for party names, legal terms, statute references, or any phrase.
How many cases can I collect in one run?	You can set the maximum up to 1,000,000 cases per run. The actual number returned depends on how many results match your query and court filter.
What export formats are supported?	Your dataset can be exported to CSV, JSON, Excel, or XML directly from Apify's storage, so it works with any downstream tool or database.
Is this an official UK government API?	No. This is an independent scraper that reads the public Find Case Law website. It is not affiliated with The National Archives or the UK government.
Can I schedule this to run automatically?	Yes. Apify supports scheduled runs, so you can set this scraper to collect new judgments daily, weekly, or on any cron schedule you choose.

Related actors

Browse the full ParseForge collection for more scrapers.

🆘 Need help? Email parseforge@protonmail.com with your run ID, your input, and what you expected.

⚠️ Disclaimer. This Actor is unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The National Archives. It collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using the collected data in compliance with the source's terms of service and applicable data-protection laws, including GDPR, CCPA, and PIPL. Do not use it to collect personal data unlawfully.