Recap MCP server

RECAP — documents filed in US federal court cases

Direct links to the complaints, motions, orders and exhibits filed in federal cases. No API key, no PACER fee.

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

Auth

None.

How this is possible without a key

RECAP documents are not in CourtListener's bulk export. They are mirrored to the Internet Archive under an identifier that can be derived:

gov.uscourts.<court_id>.<pacer_case_id>

Federal docket coverage carries courtid for 100% of dockets and pacercase_id for 84.8%, so a case's filings have a computable address. No agreement with anyone, no per-page charge.

What you get, and what you don't

You get: a link to each PDF, its docket-entry number and attachment number, its size, and the docket sheet where one exists.

You don't get text. Measured across 400 dockets: 141 archive items carry PDFs and none carry extracted text. Reading a filing means opening the document. Making these searchable would be an OCR project; this is not one.

Coverage is partial, and uneven

RECAP holds what PACER users have paid for and contributed, so coverage follows where lawyers use it. Measured over 400 dockets across 16 courts:

Overall: 35.8%.

The consequence matters more than the number: "no documents" means none have been contributed to RECAP — not that nothing was filed. Roughly two cases in three will come back empty, and every response says so. Treating an empty result as a fact about the court record would be wrong most of the time.

Tool

recapfilings — give it a docketid from any docket search, or a court plus docket_number.

recap_filings({docket_id: 73433096})
  → V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump (cafc), 18 documents

Filenames encode the structure: ….12.0.pdf is docket entry 12, ….12.1.pdf its first attachment. That ordering is the only structure the archive provides — there are no document titles — so it is returned rather than hidden.

Related

bankruptcy_search — find the docket first

• federalcivilsearch, federalcriminalsearch, federalappealsearch,

• court-listener — opinions and full case text, a different corpus entirely

Data sources

• https://archive.org/ — RECAP archive items
• Federal docket coverage (CourtListener bulk data, Public Domain Mark)

RECAP exists because Free Law Project built it and PACER users contributed to it:

Quick Start

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

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

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/recap/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.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.