Legal research means juggling systems. PACER for dockets. USPTO for patents and trademarks. Case law databases for opinions. Each with its own login, its own quirks, its own context switch.
Today we're adding federal docket tracking, patent search, and trademark lookup to Case.dev. All free.
What's New
Federal docket search. Search court dockets and filings across every federal district and appellate court. Filter by party, court, or date range. Pull full filing histories and see which documents are freely available through RECAP (with the option to search directly on PACER at pass-through costs). The associate monitoring 30 active matters no longer needs to log into PACER each morning and check them one by one. Court lookup is included so you can resolve any court by name.
Patent search. The full USPTO Open Data Portal, searchable. Every US application and grant since 2001, refreshed daily. Filter by technology area, assignee, inventor, status, or date range. Built for freedom-to-operate analyses, M&A portfolio evaluations, and prior art research. And because it lives next to case law search, you can find a patent dispute in the opinions and pull the patent itself without switching tools.
Trademark lookup. Look up any US trademark by serial or registration number. Returns mark text, status, owner, goods and services, Nice classification, filing dates, and attorney of record. The TSDR lookup that interrupts your workflow three times a week is now one call you can make inline.
How It All Comes Together
These join an existing platform of 9 capabilities: case law search across 400+ jurisdictions, citation verification, similar-case discovery, Bluebook citation parsing, citation extraction from document URLs, full-text retrieval with highlights, deep multi-query research, and jurisdiction resolution. 13 tools total, designed to chain together.
Litigation. Search case law on an issue. Verify every citation your AI assistant produces against authoritative sources. Pull the lead case's federal docket to see if there's been recent activity. Review the latest filings without leaving your workflow.
IP due diligence. Search patents by assignee to map a target company's portfolio. Cross-reference with trademark registrations to get the full picture of their IP position. Pull related case law to check for ongoing disputes.
Brief drafting. Run a deep research query that generates multiple search variations to surface cases a single query would miss. Verify every citation in the draft. Extract all citations from an opposing brief by URL and retrieve the full text of each one.
One API key across all of it. Seven of thirteen capabilities are free, including everything announced today. Docket, patent, and trademark tools are pass-throughs to public data (CourtListener RECAP and USPTO). No underlying cost, no reason to charge. The rest run between $0.005 and $0.05 per request.
Why It Matters
Fragmentation is the real cost of legal research. Not the subscription fees. The five open tabs and three different systems you navigate before the actual analysis begins.
One platform for case law, dockets, patents, and trademarks. The docket search that runs before you get to the office. The citation check that fires every time AI drafts a memo. The patent search that happens during intake.
Legal research should be infrastructure, not a chore.
