Watch any court docket for free, and hear about it the moment something new is filed.
ARGUS Free Docket Watch keeps an eye on the dockets you care about on the free public court source, and when a new document lands it tells you in plain language, with the response deadline already worked out. No PACER meter running, no logging in to check by hand.
Watch a docket free See a sample filing alert
THE PROBLEM
If you have an active case, the thing that hurts you is the filing you did not see in time. A motion drops, a clock starts, and you find out late because nobody was watching, or because checking meant paying PACER by the page and squinting at a raw docket entry that does not tell you what it means or when you have to respond. The free alerts that do exist usually hand you a one-line entry and stop there, so you still have to open the document, read it, and figure out the deadline yourself. For a solo litigator or a person representing themselves, that gap is where cases go sideways.
HOW IT WORKS
You tell it which dockets to watch. Once a day it checks the free public court source (CourtListener and RECAP) for anything new, and when a filing appears it does two things the raw alerts do not, it summarizes the filing in plain language so you know what actually happened, and it computes the response deadline from the filing date so you know when you have to act. Then it sends you a short digest. That is the whole product, deliberately. It is restricted to the free source and it carries none of the prediction machinery from our paid legal tools, because a free watch should be simple, honest, and cost nothing.
WHAT YOU GET
For every watched docket, when something moves: - a plain-language summary of the new filing, not just a raw docket line, - the response deadline, computed from the filing date so you are not doing calendar math, - a short digest delivered on a daily cadence, with the source (CourtListener, free) named on every item so you always know where it came from, - zero cost and zero card, because this is the free tier and it is meant to stay that way.
WHO IT'S FOR
Solo and small-firm litigators, people representing themselves, and paralegals who are tracking a handful of active dockets and do not want to pay per page just to know when something moved. Also journalists and legal-ops folks watching specific cases. If you need sealed or PACER-only filings in real time across a high volume of matters, that is the paid upgrade, not this free front door, and we will tell you so plainly rather than pretend the free tier covers it.
PRICING
This product is free, on purpose. It is the front door. - Free, watch a handful of dockets on the free public source, daily, with plain-language summaries and computed deadlines. No card, no login gauntlet. - Pro (a hypothesis we are still validating, not a commitment), more dockets, paid-source coverage through PACER and Bloomberg, faster cadence, and the full ARGUS monitor with significance scoring. - Firm, team seats and the wider SCE legal suite attached.
Any step that would ever take your money is gated and confirmed before it runs, and PACER's per-page charges, if you opt into paid sources, are passed through with your confirmation, never billed silently.
THE PROOF (dogfood)
We watch our own docket with this before we ask you to. The founder is litigating a real housing matter in New York (440 Irving, pro se), and that live docket is the canonical test target, a case where missing a new filing has real consequence, watched on the free source with the deadlines computed. We run the free tier on ourselves, on a case that actually matters, on zero spend. And the product's own build left a receipt, the deliverable pattern was scored by our quality gate and every atom it composes was verified on disk before this page was written, which is the same discipline the SCE paid tools sell.
HONEST NOTE
We would rather under-promise. What is true today, the pattern is built, it composes existing verified capabilities (the CourtListener fetch, the docket parse, the summary, the deadline math, the digest), the references resolve, and it passed the quality score. What is NOT true yet, it has not run live, because the free CourtListener access still has to be provisioned and no live API call or system boot has happened in this build. The first real run is watching the 440 Irving docket end to end. That is a credentials-and-access step, not a missing-capability step, and we will say which one we are on rather than imply a proof we have not run. One more honest line, the reason a free watch matters (PACER charges by the page, the free source does not) is a market observation we believe, not a specific dated ruling we are citing, and we will keep it framed that way.
Watch a docket free
*This page is a specification. The capability it describes is not built yet, and nothing here is a claim that it runs today.*