Breaking Complaints on Bloomberg Law

As you might know by now, Bloomberg Law is an excellent source for finding court filings from federal, state, and even some foreign or international courts. By clicking on the “Litigation & Dockets” tab, you can search, update, and track dockets with ease. You’ll also find a link there to “Breaking Complaints,” a unique service that we’ll spend the rest of this post describing.

Bloomberg Law has positioned researchers in more than thirty state or federal courts across the country who upload complaints as they are filed with the court. In some cases, you can find complaints that have been filed within the past hour or two! You can find a full list of the courts for which this service is available at Bloomberg Law’s Breaking Complaints Overview site.

Courts are chosen for this service based on the likelihood that litigation relevant to business and finance will commence there. New York state trial courts covering New York City and nearby New Jersey Courts, for instance, are part of the Breaking Complaints service, as is the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Once you access the Breaking Complaints results list, you can sort and filter by date or by court. The complaints that enter the system through Breaking Complaints are also available by regular docket search, as well.

For an up-to-date list of jurisdictions where Bloomberg Law’s docket coverage is available generally and what court documents you can find within, see this list of All Coverage (or, if you prefer, the same information in map form).