Federal Civil MCP server

Federal civil litigation

Federal civil litigation in US district courts — everything not captioned United States v. .... The largest categories are prisoner civil rights and habeas petitions, then civil rights employment, product liability and contract.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1576+ live data sources.

No API key.

What this is, and what it is not

Docket metadata: that a case exists, its parties, court, docket number, filing and termination dates, and assigned judge. It contains no filings — no complaints, motions, briefs or orders. Those are RECAP, a separate corpus that is not keyless.

An agent with this data knows a case was brought. It does not know what anyone argued.

Tools

Caveats

never still open. Responses say which.

• Quarterly snapshot. Every response carries snapshot_date.
• dateterminated is 78.3% filled, so a missing date means not recorded*,

This can tell you a company is in federal court; it often cannot tell you what for.

• natureofsuit is sparse — 14.8% corpus-wide, 30.5% in district courts.

name works better than a full caption.

• Party search matches a substring of the case caption, so a distinctive party

Attribution

Data is CourtListener / Free Law Project, published under the Public Domain Mark. Free Law Project funds and maintains the corpus. If this pack is useful to you, is where that goes.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "federal-civil": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/federal-civil/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/federal-civil/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1576+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/federal_civil_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"party":"Monsanto","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/federalcivilsearch. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "federal-civil": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-federal-civil"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.