About DocketDrift

DocketDrift is a navigator for the public record — specifically, state appellate court opinions. We collate published opinions from official sources, normalize them into a structured archive, and make patterns in judicial decisions easier to find and read together.

Who DocketDrift is for

DocketDrift is built for appellate attorneys, journalists, academic researchers, and self-represented litigants. State appellate research has historically been dominated by paid databases. DocketDrift treats the public record as what it is: public.

Methodology

All source material in DocketDrift comes from public records. Opinions are ingested from official court releases and the open Free Law Project / CourtListener archive. Where structured fields (case number, disposition, author) can be extracted reliably from the published text, they're populated automatically. Where they can't, they're left empty for human review.

Patterns and case-pairs that the system surfaces are tools for human review, never assertions of judicial inconsistency. Two cases citing the same statute with opposite outcomes are usually legitimately different — different facts, different procedural posture, different sub-issues. The "did this judge contradict themselves" question is a question for a human reader; we just make the pairs easier to find.

Data sources

• CourtListener (Free Law Project) — historical backfill and a standing source for ongoing ingestion. CourtListener typically lags real-time by a few weeks; for Minnesota that backfill reaches the founding-era 1851 opinions of the territorial supreme court forward.
• Direct ingestion from the courts — some courts publish opinions that don't reach CourtListener promptly, particularly nonprecedential and order opinions. For those we read the court's own release archive directly. Both paths run weekly on a scheduled job, so each state is typically current to within a week.

Known coverage gaps

Coverage is not uniform, and we'd rather say so than let a silence read as completeness. Minnesota's 2017–2025 range was affected.

The cause is upstream rather than in our processing. CourtListener, which supplies our historical Minnesota data, has no Minnesota appellate opinions on file for 2020–2022 and sharply reduced coverage from 2017 through the present — as of mid-2026 its live ingestion for the Minnesota Court of Appeals is still running at a fraction of the court's actual output. The opinions themselves were published normally and remain available from the Minnesota State Law Library. (We've reported this upstream, with data.)

That entire range has now been rebuilt by reading the State Law Library archive directly — roughly 9,800 opinions that were previously absent. Minnesota now runs continuously, with every year from 2015 through 2025 holding between about 970 and 1,435 opinions, and 2026 kept current by our own weekly reading of the court's releases:

• 2020, 2021, 2022 — rebuilt from zero to roughly 1,040, 1,090 and 970.
• 2017, 2018, 2019 — rebuilt to about 1,350, 1,325 and 1,430.
• 2023, 2024, 2025 — rebuilt to about 1,015, 1,160 and 1,130.

Rebuilt years are substantially covered rather than provably complete, and the shortfalls are specific:

• Roughly four in five Court of Appeals opinions, measured against a control period we can check against complete data.
• About half of Supreme Court filings. The archive publishes Supreme opinions but not Supreme orders — attorney discipline, administrative rule dockets, and similar — so those are absent.
• No reporter citations. These are assigned by a commercial reporter after publication and reach us through CourtListener's bulk data, which has nothing for the years CourtListener is missing. So a 2021 case is readable, searchable, and citable by its docket number, but you cannot reach it by pasting its N.W.2d cite.

Rebuilt opinions do carry citation links: we extract the cases each opinion cites from the text itself, so the “cited by” and “authorities cited” panels work for them.

If your research depends on a Minnesota Supreme Court order from any year, or on exhaustive coverage of any single rebuilt year, check the State Law Library archive as well.

Editorial review

Machine extraction does the bulk-work part — case number, disposition, panel composition, statute citations. A separate human editorial pass curates the doctrinal tags, catches parser misses, and flags edge cases. That pass is ongoing across a corpus of more than 119,000 opinions, and most records have not yet been read by an editor; the tag-review queue currently holds tens of thousands of pending suggestions.

Rather than hide that, we publish it per record. Every opinion carries a status indicator showing whether it is processed (machine-parsed, awaiting review), flagged (queued for re-review), or human-reviewed, and every auto-applied tag is marked as such. You can see at a glance which records have been read by a human and which have not — including when the answer is "not yet."

Status

Flagship · Minnesota Live · New Hampshire Live · Arizona

• Minnesota — 68,000+ opinions spanning 1851 to current, refreshed weekly as new opinions are released. Judge dossiers, outcome categorization, statute citation graph, semantic search, and tag-suggestion review pipeline are all live. 2017–2025 was rebuilt from the State Law Library archive, so coverage is continuous through the present; see Known coverage gaps above for what rebuilt years still lack.
• New Hampshire — full NH Supreme Court corpus loaded: 20,000+ opinions. Byline-extracted judicial panel graph populated. Semantic search, citation graph, and tag-suggestion pipelines running. Opinions are read directly from the court's own releases, so NH is typically current within days.
• Arizona — full Arizona Supreme Court + Court of Appeals corpus loaded: 38,000+ opinions. Byline extraction live for both the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals; disposition parsing covers modern opinions at roughly 90% and thins out on pre-1980 text.

Don't see your state? Request it →

Open source

DocketDrift is open source on GitHub at OnionMadder/docketdrift, under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 — the same license CourtListener uses. The parser rules, ingestion logic, and infrastructure are all readable, auditable, and forkable. It also stands on open work by others — Free Law Project's CourtListener data, Voyage AI embeddings, Django, MariaDB, and HTMX: the full credits are here →

Contact

Notice an error in an opinion record, a judge bio, or a search result? Send a note to hello@docketdrift.com.

Privacy

We don't log search queries, track users, or save research history. Full privacy statement →