Why Is My Information Online?

Justia's dockets and court filings provide public litigation records from federal and state courts as a public service. These records, some of which are the law of the land, should be available to all to read.

When reviewing documents on Justia Dockets & Filings, please note the following:

1. The information displayed is from official records, but does not comprise all information from court records available to the public.

2. If private information is revealed in evidence, pleadings, or other documents (such as exhibits, affidavits, and transcripts) that are part of the public court record, that information will become available when court electronic records are made accessible to the public.

3. Some opinions and other court documents have been marked as "Not for publication." This marker means simply that the document generally cannot be cited or relied upon in subsequent cases. Many courts, including the Federal Courts, allow their unpublished opinions to be cited. It does not mean that the opinion has been sealed or that contents of the opinion are protected or private information.

4. Since these dockets, filings, and opinions are in the public record, Justia will not fully remove items from our database without an applicable court order marking such records under seal or designating them for removal from the public record. Judges, lawyers, and individuals rely on previous court records and decisions to determine how they should proceed in future cases. If you want your information deleted from the Justia site, you should contact the court directly or hire an attorney to do so to petition the court to seal your information.

5. Personal identifying information in court records that are otherwise available to the public is not considered to be “personal information” under the California Consumer Privacy Act, and is therefore exempt from its “right to know” and “right to request deletion” provisions.

6. While Justia will not fully remove records that are not under seal, reasonable accommodation will be made upon written request to block case filings and opinions from appearing in search engine results using the robots.txt protocol. This means when a person searches for your docket or opinion using a search engine such as Google, that page from Justia should not show up in the search results. However, please note, many courts today make their opinions publicly available on the Internet. Many other organizations also publish these opinions. Justia can only block webpages from our own database. Your case may be located on several different websites, and we cannot control webpages on sites that are not from Justia.

7. Once the robots.txt protocol has been applied to a link from our database, we have no control over how long it will take for the link(s) to the document(s) to come out of the search engines.

Disclaimer: Justia Dockets & Filings provides public litigation records from the federal appellate and district courts. These filings and docket sheets should not be considered findings of fact or liability, nor do they necessarily reflect the view of Justia.


Why Is My Information Online?