Remove Court Records from Caselaw.gov (2026 Guide)

What Is Caselaw.com?

Caselaw.com is a court opinion aggregator and legal research platform that makes federal and state court decisions freely searchable online. The platform indexes decisions from the US Supreme Court, federal circuit and district courts, and state appellate and supreme court opinions across all 50 states. Unlike subscription-based legal research platforms such as Westlaw or LexisNexis, Caselaw.com requires no account, no registration, and no payment to access its content. Any member of the public -- including search engine crawlers -- can access every page on the platform without restriction.

This open-access model distinguishes Caselaw.com sharply from its subscription-based counterparts. Westlaw and LexisNexis publish substantially more case law and docket information, but their content sits behind authentication walls that prevent Google from indexing it. A case on Westlaw will not rank in a Google search of your name. A case on Caselaw.com very well might -- and the domain's authority means it ranks quickly and persistently. The practical difference for individuals named in court opinions is enormous: Westlaw creates a research record visible to attorneys and legal professionals, while Caselaw.com creates a public search record visible to anyone who types your name into Google.

The platform's stated mission is to democratize access to legal information -- making court decisions available to the public without cost or institutional subscription. That mission has significant public benefit for civic education and legal research, but it creates a direct tension with the privacy interests of individuals named in court opinions who have moved past the circumstances of their cases. Caselaw.com is not a data broker in the traditional sense -- it is primarily a court record publisher -- but its practical effect on search results is similar to data broker platforms: it surfaces personal information in Google results that individuals often want removed.

Why Caselaw.com Records Rank in Google

Caselaw.com's Google ranking strength comes from several reinforcing factors. First, domain authority: the platform has been indexed by Google for years, has attracted links from law schools, legal aid organizations, academic researchers, and news outlets, and publishes millions of authoritative legal documents. Google treats these as high-quality sources on legal topics. Second, content structure: court opinions are formal documents that contain party names prominently in the case caption, the opinion heading, and repeatedly throughout the body of the decision. Google's systems interpret this repeated, structured mention of a name in an authoritative document as a strong signal that the page is relevant to searches for that name. Third, freshness and breadth: Caselaw.com continuously adds new decisions, which keeps it crawled frequently and keeps its overall domain authority high.

The result is that a new court opinion published on Caselaw.com can appear in Google search results for a party's name within days. For high-profile cases or cases involving well-known individuals or companies, the listing may reach page one within a week or two. For less-prominent individuals, the ranking trajectory may be slower -- but because the content is static and the domain authority is persistent, Caselaw.com listings tend to remain in the top results for years without any active effort from the platform. An opinion published in 2014 about a case that concluded in 2013 can still rank on page one of Google in 2026 for a party's name, completely unchanged in text and with no indication of what happened subsequently.

This persistence is part of what makes court opinion aggregator listings particularly damaging compared to news articles, which are sometimes updated or archived. Court opinions are static historical documents. They do not report on resolution, rehabilitation, or context. They present a snapshot of a moment in litigation -- often the moment of maximum conflict and maximum negative framing -- and that snapshot stays indexed, without any accompanying narrative of what came after, until it is addressed. See our related guides on CourtListener removal, Casetext removal, and Justia removal for the full landscape of court opinion platforms that create Google search exposure.

How to Submit a Removal Request to Caselaw.com

Caselaw.com has a contact channel for privacy and removal requests, and it has demonstrated willingness to evaluate requests submitted with documented grounds. The key is specificity and documentation. A specific, documented request that clearly identifies the URL, articulates the legal or privacy grounds, and attaches supporting documentation is the format that receives serious consideration, which is why we build every request that way rather than sending a general note about search visibility.

The strongest documented grounds for a Caselaw.com removal request include: (1) A court-ordered sealing or expungement. If a court has formally sealed or expunged the record, that order is the most powerful tool available. Attach a copy of the court order to your removal request and cite the specific order by case number, jurisdiction, and date. Caselaw.com should honor this. (2) Cases involving minors. If you were under 18 at the time of the proceedings and the opinion uses your full name in a way that a court would have restricted had procedures been properly followed, that argument has merit and should be presented clearly. (3) Records containing sensitive personal data. Court filings sometimes contain Social Security numbers, financial account numbers, medical information, or home addresses that were not properly redacted before the opinion was published. Federal and state court rules require redaction of such information, and a removal or redaction request citing those rules -- Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 5.2 for federal cases, equivalent state rules for state cases -- is well-grounded.

(4) Privacy-based arguments for older cases with minimal public interest. For cases involving private individuals (not public figures or public officials), where the litigation concluded without significant public consequence, and where the continued indexing creates ongoing reputational harm significantly disproportionate to any public benefit, a written request documenting that harm and the absence of ongoing public interest is worth submitting. This argument is strengthened if you are a resident of a state with strong privacy laws -- California's CCPA, for example, provides additional grounds for privacy-based removal requests even from publishers that are not traditional data brokers.

When submitting a removal request, identify yourself clearly, provide the specific URL of the page you want removed, state your grounds precisely, attach any supporting documentation, and provide your contact information for follow-up. Written requests sent through the platform's contact channel with a clear subject line referencing "Privacy Removal Request" tend to receive better routing than generic contact form submissions.

Sealing and Expungement: The Source-Level Solution

For individuals who have not yet pursued sealing or expungement of the underlying court record, these legal processes represent the most powerful tools available -- not only for addressing Caselaw.com but for the entire ecosystem of court record aggregators and search results simultaneously. When a court issues a sealing order, it directs that the record be restricted from public access. When a court expunges a record, it goes further -- in many jurisdictions, directing that the record be destroyed or treated as though it never existed. Either action gives you documented legal grounds to demand removal from every platform publishing that record.

Eligibility for sealing and expungement varies significantly by jurisdiction and case type. Criminal records are most commonly eligible in states with expungement statutes -- many states allow expungement of arrests that did not result in conviction, first-time nonviolent offenses after a waiting period, and certain juvenile records. Civil records follow different rules, and they can be sealed when the case involves particularly sensitive personal information, involved a minor, or where sealing is in the interest of justice and no countervailing public interest is present. Family court records involving custody, divorce, and domestic matters are sealed in many jurisdictions by default or upon request.

The process for obtaining sealing or expungement typically involves filing a petition with the court, serving relevant parties, and attending a hearing at which the court evaluates whether the statutory requirements are met. In many jurisdictions, individuals can pursue this process without an attorney, though an attorney familiar with the jurisdiction's expungement laws will increase the likelihood of a successful outcome and handle the procedural requirements correctly. Once an order is entered, you can use it to demand removal from Caselaw.com, Justia, CourtListener, and every other aggregator simultaneously.

Google De-Indexing as a Backup Strategy

When source-level removal from Caselaw.com needs more time or stronger grounds, Google de-indexing offers a parallel path that addresses the primary means by which most people encounter the record. A successful Google de-indexing request causes a specific URL to disappear from Google search results, even if the underlying page continues to exist on Caselaw.com's servers. For most practical purposes, a record that does not appear in Google search results is a record that most people will never find.

Google offers several de-indexing mechanisms depending on the nature of the content and the requester's circumstances. Google's legal removal troubleshooter is the primary submission channel for court records; it allows requests based on court orders (sealed or expunged records), personal information removal (sensitive data like SSNs appearing in the indexed content), and other legal grounds. The outdated content removal tool is available for older cases -- cases that concluded years ago, were resolved without adverse findings, or where the person's circumstances have materially changed since the opinion was published. Google evaluates outdated content requests on a case-by-case basis; the argument is strongest when the case is old, the person is a private individual, and the continued prominence in search results serves no current public interest. Use Google's legal removal troubleshooter to initiate a de-indexing request for specific Caselaw.com URLs.

For EU and UK residents, the Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) process under GDPR provides a formal mechanism for de-indexing court records from Google. RTBF requests are evaluated against a balancing test that weighs the privacy interests of the individual against the public interest in access to the information. For private individuals involved in older cases where continued Google visibility serves no meaningful public interest, RTBF requests have been granted by Google's European operations in a meaningful percentage of cases. This route is built for EU and UK residents, and for European nationals or residents with records appearing on US court aggregators it is a viable and often underused tool. US residents have the court-order and personal-information routes above.

The AI Search Problem in 2026

In 2026, AI-powered search has become a significant vector for reputational harm from court records. Google AI Overviews, which appear at the top of many search results pages, synthesize information from indexed sources -- including court opinion aggregators -- and present it as a summary without requiring a user to click through to the source. If your court record appears on Caselaw.com and is indexed by Google, it may be incorporated into AI Overview summaries that appear at the top of your name search results. This creates a visibility problem that sits above traditional organic search results.

Similarly, AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity use court opinion content as training data and citation sources. Queries about a person's legal history, past litigation, or professional background may return responses that cite court record aggregators directly, presenting information from resolved cases as though it were current and definitive. This is particularly damaging for executives, professionals, and public figures whose names are commonly searched, and for individuals in regulated industries where litigation history is scrutinized during background checks and licensing processes.

The most durable solution to AI search exposure is source-level removal -- eliminating the record from Caselaw.com and other aggregators so that AI systems cannot retrieve or cite it in future queries. De-indexing from Google reduces AI Overview exposure, and source-level work reaches AI systems that access the content directly from the source rather than through Google's index. This is why the source-level removal process -- removal from Caselaw.com, sealing or expungement at the court level, and simultaneous requests to other aggregators including Casetext, CourtListener, and Justia -- produces more complete results than any single-channel approach.