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.
How is this different from the court's free text reminders?
The Alaska Court System offers free text-message reminders: text a case number to its reminder line and you get one text at 4 pm the afternoon before each hearing on that case. If you have a case, use it — sign up on the court's Court Guide text reminders page.
It answers a different question than we do. The court reminds you about a hearing on a case you already know you're on. AK Court Watch watches for the hearings you don't know about: it matches attorney names (not just case numbers) against every calendar statewide, checks every 30 minutes through the day, and emails you the same day when an add-on calendar sets a hearing with your name on it — the kind that posts after the previous afternoon's reminder would have gone out. We're unofficial and not affiliated with the court system.
What does it cost?
Browsing the court location pages is free, and anyone can try a search. To see whether a name or case is on calendar you create a free account — which starts a free week of email alerts (up to 5 watches, no card). After the week you keep the Free plan: one case-number watch, with an email the same day its calendar changes. Watching attorney names, more watches, and the morning and midday digests are paid plans; 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.