Frequently asked questions
What does AK Court Watch do?
It reads the Alaska Court System's public daily calendar PDFs for every court location, statewide, and makes them searchable in one place. Type an attorney or case name and see in seconds whether it appears on today's or the next business day's calendars — instead of opening forty PDFs.
Where does the data come from?
Straight from the court system's own daily public calendars. We download each PDF as published and archive it unchanged, so any search result can be checked against the document the court actually posted.
How often does it update?
We fetch every calendar every 30 minutes, from 6 am to 6 pm Alaska time on weekdays. That cadence matters because the courts don't publish just once: today's calendars post by early morning, and add-on calendars with late-set hearings keep posting through the morning — many between 9 am and noon. Those add-ons are exactly the hearings people miss.
Alert subscribers get email on a predictable rhythm: a morning digest once the daily calendars post, a midday digest after the add-on calendars, and between those, an email only when a check finds a new same-day hearing. Every email covers all of your watches — including the quiet ones — with new items marked.
What does it cost?
Searching the calendars, the calendar archive, and the court location pages are free. Email alerts — where we watch every calendar for your name and email you the moment it appears — are a paid subscription; current pricing is on the alerts page.
What are the limits?
We're unofficial, and calendars change through the day — hearings get added, moved, and vacated after we fetch. Parsing PDFs is best-effort, so a name can occasionally be attributed to the wrong field (our search also scans each entry's full text to compensate). Confidential case types never appear, because they're not in the court's public calendars to begin with. And not finding a name here is not proof there's no hearing: always confirm against the official calendars, CourtView, or the clerk of court.
Is this a background check?
No. We only show calendar activity in aggregate on public pages, and even the court says its own case search "is NOT a criminal history records check" (Search Cases). Criminal history checks come from the Alaska Department of Public Safety.
Something looks wrong — who do I tell?
If a page disagrees with the official calendar, trust the official calendar and the clerk, then let us know via the contact address on the disclaimer & privacy page so we can fix the parser.