Remove Court Records from Fastcase (2026 Guide)

What Is Fastcase and Why Court Opinions Appear There

Fastcase launched in 1999 as a legal research platform with a distinctive model: rather than requiring individual attorney subscriptions at the full market rate, Fastcase partnered with state bar associations to provide free access to their members as a bar membership benefit. This approach made Fastcase one of the most widely used legal research tools in the country -- attorneys in the majority of US states have had access to Fastcase through their bar association at no additional cost. In 2022, Fastcase merged with vLex, a global legal research company, creating one of the largest legal information networks in the world. Today Fastcase operates as part of vLex's platform, and any requests related to Fastcase content should be directed through vLex's support and legal channels.

Fastcase's coverage spans the US federal appellate system comprehensively: all federal circuit courts, the US Supreme Court, and a large portion of federal district court decisions. Its state court coverage is particularly strong -- the platform has invested heavily in state appellate court opinions as a differentiator from larger competitors that historically focused on federal content. This makes Fastcase a significant repository for state-level litigation outcomes, including cases involving private individuals in family law, employment, civil rights, contract, and criminal matters that produced written appellate opinions.

Court opinions appear on Fastcase for the same reason they appear on any legal research platform: these are public records produced by the court system, and legal research platforms exist to make them searchable and accessible to practitioners. Fastcase retrieves opinion data from court systems directly, from official reporters, and from data partnerships. When your name appears in an opinion -- as a party, an attorney, or in the body of the decision -- Fastcase indexes it as part of that opinion and makes it searchable. The platform's value to attorneys depends on this comprehensiveness; gaps in coverage undermine the research tool's reliability.

How Fastcase Differs from Justia and CourtListener

For most people researching court record removal, the most important practical distinction is accessibility. Justia and CourtListener are fully public platforms -- anyone can search and read their content without any login or subscription, and Google indexes their content comprehensively. This is why a Justia or CourtListener listing typically creates a direct, immediate Google search problem: the opinion is on a high-authority domain, freely accessible, and prominently indexed. Our guides on Justia court record removal and CourtListener removal cover those platforms in detail.

Fastcase's accessibility model is different. The core Fastcase platform is accessible through bar member logins -- an attorney uses their state bar credentials to log in, and searches happen within a private session. Content inside the bar-member Fastcase system is not indexed by Google in the same way public platforms are. This means that a court opinion available on Fastcase does not automatically rank in Google for your name search simply because it exists on Fastcase's servers. For Google search visibility specifically, Fastcase typically presents less immediate exposure than Justia or CourtListener.

However, the distinction is not absolute. Fastcase, as part of the vLex platform, has some publicly accessible content -- certain case pages and legal summaries are reachable without a login, and vLex's expanded platform includes publicly indexed materials. Additionally, the same opinion that exists on Fastcase is almost certainly also available on Justia, CourtListener, Google Scholar, or other public platforms -- so the Google visibility problem often exists regardless of Fastcase's privacy architecture. The key difference is the audience: Fastcase is primarily a professional legal research tool. When someone searches for your name on Google, they will likely encounter a Justia or CourtListener listing before they encounter a Fastcase listing. But when an attorney, a paralegal, an investigator, or a compliance professional runs a legal research search for your name, they will encounter the Fastcase listing directly.

Can You Request Removal from Fastcase?

Fastcase does not offer a standard request process for court opinions, so the route to removal runs through the source record and the right documentation. Fastcase -- now operating under vLex -- treats its court opinion database as a reflection of official public records. Its approach, consistent with Westlaw, LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law, and other professional legal research databases, is built around giving attorneys accurate, complete access to court opinions, which is why a documented change to the record is what gets its attention.

This is both a principled position and a practical reality. Attorneys depend on legal research platforms for complete, reliable access to the body of case law. A legal research platform has to stay reliable for practitioners and consistent with the principle that the court record is a public record, so requests work best when they rest on a documented basis. A general preference or the reputational impact alone is not what moves a request; a specific, documented basis is, and that is how we build each one.

For opinions that contain information that should not have been included in a public filing in the first place -- social security numbers, financial account numbers, medical records, or the names of minor children -- a different avenue exists. Courts in most jurisdictions allow parties to file motions to redact specific personal information from public filings and opinions. If granted, the redaction flows through to the official record, and legal research databases including Fastcase should eventually reflect the updated version. This is a targeted route for specific data exposure, and it can be a strong fit when sensitive identifiers appear in an opinion.

The most consequential action you can take at the Fastcase level is to contact vLex's support team directly when you have obtained a court order sealing or expunging the underlying record. Providing the support team with a copy of the court order and requesting an expedited database update is more effective than simply waiting for automatic propagation, which can take weeks or months. Fastcase and vLex update their databases through periodic re-pulls from court systems and data providers; a direct communication with supporting documentation accelerates that process.

Sealing and Expungement: The Source-Level Solution

Because Fastcase's opinion database follows the official court record, the most comprehensive route is action at the originating court. Sealing and expungement are distinct legal mechanisms that work differently depending on the jurisdiction and the type of case, but both have the effect of converting a public court record into a restricted or eliminated one -- and that change eventually flows through to legal research databases that source their content from official court records.

Expungement is the more complete remedy: it eliminates the record from the court system's official files. Eligibility for expungement varies significantly by state and by case type. Criminal records are expungeable in most states for certain categories of offenses -- typically first-time or nonviolent offenses, dismissed charges, acquittals, and juvenile records -- when the defendant meets the eligibility criteria and the waiting period has passed. Civil records follow a different path than criminal records, with sealing as the more common tool, though some specific categories (certain family court matters, youthful civil violations) may be eligible for expungement depending on the jurisdiction.

Sealing is available more broadly and restricts access to the record without eliminating it. A sealed record remains in the court system but is not publicly accessible -- it cannot be obtained through public records requests, and it should not appear in publicly available legal research databases. Sealing is available in many civil contexts where expungement is not, including certain family law matters, civil settlements with confidentiality provisions, and cases involving sensitive categories of personal information. The grounds for sealing are jurisdiction-specific and often require a balance between the public interest in open court proceedings and the private interest in restricting access to sensitive or potentially harmful records.

For court opinions specifically -- as opposed to underlying case files -- sealing or modification at the appellate level is a separate process that often needs deeper analysis. Appellate courts publish opinions to communicate legal reasoning to the bar and to develop the law, so they look for compelling grounds before sealing or depublishing. Petitions to depublish, seal, or modify appellate opinions do exist and can be granted when the grounds are strong. An attorney specializing in privacy law or appellate procedure is the appropriate resource for evaluating whether a specific opinion is a candidate for court-level modification.

Google De-Indexing for Fastcase Content

For Fastcase or vLex URLs that do appear in Google search results, a Google de-indexing request can address the Google search visibility problem without requiring Fastcase's cooperation. When a specific URL is de-indexed from Google, it no longer appears in Google search results for name searches -- even if the underlying Fastcase or vLex page continues to exist. For pages that are publicly accessible and ranking in Google, this is a meaningful lever.

The practical point is that most of the Google search visibility for court opinions is driven by Justia, CourtListener, and Google Scholar -- not Fastcase directly. The same opinion that appears in Fastcase will typically appear on one or more of these fully public platforms, and those public URLs are what rank in Google. De-indexing a Fastcase URL, if it ranks at all, is one piece of a broader plan, and the highest-impact de-indexing targets are the public legal research platform URLs where the same opinion is freely accessible and ranking for your name.

Use Google's legal removal troubleshooter to identify and submit de-indexing requests for all URLs where the opinion appears in Google results -- including any publicly accessible Fastcase or vLex pages as well as Justia and CourtListener listings of the same opinion. The outdated content removal tool is relevant for older opinions where the person is now a private individual and the public interest in the continued prominence of the result is no longer proportionate to the harm it causes. EU and UK residents should also evaluate whether the GDPR right to be forgotten process applies to their situation -- Google is legally required to evaluate formal erasure requests from individuals covered by EU and UK data protection law.

Fastcase Court Record Removal - FAQ