See where your firm stands

Data · California court filings

How many cases are filed in each California county

New cases opened in every California superior court, county by county: car-crash and other injury cases, other civil, evictions, small claims, family law, criminal, juvenile, probate and appeals. Straight from the Judicial Council of California, for the last two fiscal years.

Checked October 26, 2026 · CC BY 4.0 · Not legal advice

What is in this dataset?

How many cases were filed in each of California's 58 superior courts (one per county) and statewide, by case type, from the Judicial Council of California's Court Statistics Reports: unlimited civil (motor-vehicle injury, other injury and wrongful death, other civil), limited civil, unlawful detainer, small claims, felonies and misdemeanors, family law, juvenile, probate, mental health and appeals. One record per county and case type, with the prior year beside it. In every table the 58 counties add up exactly to the report's own statewide row, and the totals inside each row add up too. Counts only: no lawyer or firm is listed or ranked.

Use it to see where the legal work is. A filing is a new case opened in the county's superior court, so the counts show how much demand each practice area has in each county; they do not show how many of those people hired a lawyer. Filings are for a state fiscal year (July 1 to June 30). Compare a county's count with the statewide row and with the year before, and read the report's own limits before you rely on a small county's figure.

Records
2,301
Look up by
59
area (US, state or metro)
Primary source
2,301

The letters are explained in what P, S, D and U mean.

What does a record look like?

The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.

How to cite this dataset

You can reuse, adapt and republish this data, including commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0). The only condition is that you credit Probative and link to the source.

Version
1.0.0, released October 26, 2026
Every version
10.5281/zenodo.23658523 (always points to the newest)
License
CC BY 4.0

Download the data

Free, no email or login. The files are hosted on this site and Zenodo, a public research archive.

Suggested citation

Probative. (2026). California court filings by county: civil, criminal, family, juvenile, probate and appeals, fiscal years 2023–24 and 2024–25 (Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23658524

Credit line for a chart, table or article

Source: Probative, California court filings by county: civil, criminal, family, juvenile, probate and appeals, fiscal years 2023–24 and 2024–25, version 1.0.0, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23658524, licensed CC BY 4.0.

Not legal advice. These are counts from the Judicial Council of California's published statistics, kept for marketing planning. A filing is a new case opened in the court, not a person or a client. Check the Judicial Council's current report.

How do I use it in my own tools?

Ask an AI assistant: add https://probativegrowth.com/mcp/ca-courts as an MCP connector (no sign-in), or the main server https://probativegrowth.com/mcp for every dataset. Setup for each app is on the API and MCP page.

cacourts_lookup
For one California county (for example los-angeles, san-diego, or CA for the whole state): cases filed in fiscal year 2024–25 by case type (civil, motor-vehicle injury, other injury and wrongful death, unlawful detainer, felonies, family, juvenile, probate, appeals), each with the year before and the Judicial Council table it came from.
cacourts_compare
The same filing counts side by side for up to 10 California counties (county names in lowercase with hyphens, such as san-francisco, or CA for the state).

Or read the static files, with no key and no usage cap:

What are the limits?

  • A filing is a new case opened in the court. It is not a person, and it does not tell you how many of those people hired a lawyer.
  • The latest year is the state fiscal year July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025. The Judicial Council publishes about a year behind.
  • The county is where the case was filed, not where every party lives. Small counties have small counts that can swing a lot from one year to the next.
  • A few cells are flagged by the Council as incomplete data, or printed as a dash because no cases occurred or the court did not report. We keep them blank and say so on the record, and never fill them in.
  • Case types follow the Judicial Council’s categories. “Unlimited” and “limited” civil are the Council’s own groups, split by the amount in dispute.
  • Counts only. The data never lists or ranks individual lawyers or firms.
  • Records older than 400 days since their last check are marked stale in the files until we re-check them, and we say on this page when we fix a confirmed error.

Other open datasets: Legal-marketing ethics opinions, 2015 to 2026 (data), Ad-platform policies for law firms: tracker data, Spanish-speaking clients per Spanish-speaking lawyer (data). The full list is in the data catalog.

Running a firm? You don’t need the raw data: we handle your state’s ad rules for you. See where your firm stands first.

Where do I start?

See where your firm stands.

Tick what your firm already has: 7 questions, about 2 minutes. You’ll see your stage, what we’d change first, and one place to start, with its price.

See where your firm stands

Or get a free review: Probative Growth records a 90-second video of what clients see when they look you up, and emails it within 2 business days.

Step 2 of 2. Where should we send the video for your site?

We use this to send your video. No newsletter, and no sales calls unless you ask.

We use what you send to reply. To learn which of our ads work, we tell Google, Microsoft and Meta that a request came in, with the ad you clicked (if any) and a scrambled copy of your email and phone, never your message. Never sold, never added to lists. Global Privacy Control or an email to us turns this off. By sending this form you agree to our privacy policy.

See every price