Alameda County Court Watch is now part of The Daily Californian

Two months ago, I officially transferred ownership of Alameda County Court Watch—the free, public repository of civil complaints filed in Alameda County—to The Daily Californian. As the newspaper of record for Berkeley, California, the Daily Cal shares my belief that public access to matters of public record is necessary for a society to remain free and democratic. The resources and support provided by the Daily Cal will ensure that the Court Watch can continue to fulfill this public mission for years to come.

Court Watch users will experience no disruptions because of the change in ownership. The two ways of accessing information about civil litigation in Alameda County Superior Court will continue to be updated and will remain public:

• The Google spreadsheet, where the most complete information on cases filed from May 2022 to the present is managed
• The Google Drive folder, where PDFs of civil complaints are publicly accessible and searchable

In addition, every existing civil complaint in the database—all 66,000 of them—is keeping its URL during the transition. This means that websites or other resources that link to Court Watch documents will continue to function. Going forward, questions about the service should be directed to The Daily Californian at editor⁠⁠dailycal.org.

Although this handover marks a formal change in ownership, the Court Watch has always effectively been a part of the Daily Cal. I created it in spring 2022, when I was employed by the paper as a news reporter. At the time, I was interested in improving our legal coverage, so I hastily coded a Twitter bot that I hoped would help us identify up-and-coming lawsuits. To my surprise, the plan worked: the Court Watch helped us break numerous stories about developing controversies across the East Bay. Indeed, my proudest coverage—the stories of survivors of childhood sexual abuse who were pursuing justice through the legal system—was enabled by the Court Watch.

When I left the Daily Cal in 2023, the service continued to run on the Daily Cal's dime, keeping Bay Areans informed through the paper's excellent legal coverage and the coverage of other news outlets that have used its publicly available updates. Over the past four years, the Court Watch has logged over 94,000 cases and hundreds of gigabytes of complaints, all of which have been stored using web services provided by Daily Cal. Accordingly, this transition will finally align the maintenance and ownership of the Court Watch with what's been its reality for a long time.

Alameda County Court Watch has finally found its home. Here's to hundreds of thousands more cases to come.

An archived version of the Alameda County Court Watch project page from gabeclasson.com can be found here.