Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
The Administrative Office of the United States Courts is the administrative agency of the United States federal court system, established in 1939. It provides legislative, administrative, legal, financial, management, program, and information technology support services to the federal courts. The agency operates PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which provides programmatic access to case and docket information from Federal Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy courts via the PACER Authentication API and PACER Case Locator (PCL) REST API. The agency also provides CM/ECF developer resources for building tools that interface with the Case Management and Electronic Case Filing system.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts the way a machine reads it — 24 machine-readable artifacts across 3 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts scores 30.7/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 39/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 3
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Cases API
The Cases API from Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — 1 operation(s) for cases.
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Parties API
The Parties API from Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — 1 operation(s) for parties.
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Services API
The Services API from Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — 2 operation(s) for services.
Open Collections 2
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
FinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Features 6
The notable capabilities this provider advertises, captured as structured features so they can be searched and compared instead of read one landing page at a time.
Notable capabilities this provider offers.
Federal Court Case Search
Programmatic search across a nationwide index of all Federal Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy court cases using the PCL REST API, supporting case search and party search with...
Automated PACER Authentication
Token-based authentication API enabling automated systems to obtain PACER authentication tokens without requiring a user interface, suitable for integration into automated data ...
CM/ECF Developer Integration
Technical resources for developers building tools that interface with the Case Management and Electronic Case Filing (CM/ECF) system, including XML tag specifications, NextGen C...
Court Lookup Data Feeds
JSON and XML data feeds providing court lookup information for identifying CM/ECF courts and their configurations, available for integration into court filing software.
Bankruptcy Filing Integration
Specialized resources for bankruptcy petition preparation software and case trustee management software vendors, including creditor claim filing specifications and official form...
Bulk Data Access
Commercial users can run large batch data pulls via the PCL API, with recommended off-peak hours (6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Central Time) to minimize system impact.
Security Posture 1
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Use Cases 5
What developers actually build with this provider — captured so the catalogue answers 'what is this for', not just 'what does this expose'.
What developers build with this provider.
Legal Research Automation
Law firms and legal research platforms can use the PCL API to programmatically search federal court case indexes and retrieve case and party information for automated legal rese...
Litigation Monitoring
Corporate legal departments can monitor federal court filings involving specific parties, cases, or subject matters using automated PCL API queries.
Bankruptcy Software Integration
Bankruptcy petition preparation software and trustee management applications can integrate with CM/ECF and PACER APIs to file documents, retrieve case data, and manage creditor ...
Court Data Analytics
Academic researchers and legal analytics firms can build datasets of federal court case activity using batch PCL API searches across federal court jurisdictions.
Legal Technology Development
Legal technology companies can build PACER-integrated products for case tracking, docket monitoring, and court record retrieval using the PACER Authentication and PCL APIs.
Integrations 3
Pre-built integrations with other platforms tell you where this provider already fits in a stack.
Pre-built integrations with other platforms and tools.
CM/ECF System
Case Management and Electronic Case Filing system for all federal courts.
PACER Case Locator
Nationwide index of federal court cases searchable via REST API.
NextGen CM/ECF
Next-generation electronic filing system with enhanced developer integration support.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 3
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Access & Security 1
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 1
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Company 3
The organization behind the API
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