This a short introduction to Courtsdesk, service for search, news and tracking of court cases.

Access to a Courtsdesk account gives you comprehensive search of the Irish courts system, including the only national search and archive of the Circuit Court, to judgements of the superior courts.

All of the data is linked across our user interface, so if you search for a name in one of those data sources, you can quickly toggle the view to see results for your search in the others. 

Other features include our bulk monitor, which allows for very high volume search and export of results from the Irish High Court. You want to search for 1,000 names? No problem - just upload a spreadsheet, and download the results. 

Finally, and we've made this the first point of our welcome note because it's the most important - we offer customer support to our clients and we're happy to answer any queries you may have. If you get stuck with anything, or want to offer some feedback, just click on the blue chat button and we're there to help.
​

We offer live chat support when you are logged in.  On the bottom right of your screen is a blue chat-bubble icon. You can click this to start a conversation with us at any time. If you need help, or want to offer feedback, our team will get back to you as soon as possible.  Alternatively you can email support@courtsdesk.com.

If your sign-up for a trial has been confirmed you will have received an email with a link to activate your account.  If you have not received or cannot find that email, one troubleshooting option is to trigger a password reset.
Go to:  https://www.courtsdesk.com/users/sign_in.  If you click ‘forgot your password’ you will receive a mail with instructions to access your account.   

Courtsdesk's homepage contains quick summaries of, and access to new data across all our data sources. Almost everything on the page is interactive - clicking on a name will take you the case or company where that name has been detected, and so on.
​ 

The dashboard contains: 

There are further articles on this help centre for all of those types of information or searches. 

Every page has a link to "Search FAQs" (https://www.courtsdesk.com/search_faq) which is worth a read. Above the search bar you’ll find “Quick Help” which explains some search shortcuts.

There are a number of different search types you can perform using the main search bar. Each can be found in the main search bar. 

For now these searches are applied to our current data sources.  

Courtsdesk links all silos of information where possible. This helps derive maximum insight and context from every search you perform, and every company, person or court case you view.  

When you conduct a focussed search, for example, searching for a term in the High Courts, Courtsdesk automatically searches all other data silos for that term.  At the top of your page of results you will find four buttons.  These buttons show the number of results found within each silo for the term. They are also links meaning you can quickly toggle between results sets for your search term in each silos. 

So a High Court search is also a Circuit Court diary and judgments search.
​

We have a separate full-text search facility for Irish Circuit Court Diaries Our archive extends back to April 2017 and is the first maintained searchable archive of the middle tier of the Courts in Ireland.
​

Our search functionality works like Google - the most relevant results are prioritised, rather than most recent. Every search involves a scoring methodology - sometimes referred to as ‘fuzzy’ search, i.e. it because it will find near matches or misspellings. 

You can perform exact match searches - select the "all of these exact phrases" option in the advanced search options and enter your term. Please note that spelling errors are common in the human inputted data presented by the Courts Service of Ireland.

We constantly sharpen our search algorithm as we discover ways to improve it. For example by recognising names which appear in reverse order. But from time to time, particularly with common names or short words, there may be false positives in your results.  

If you "track" a High Court case we scan it for updates every night. Due to the size of the Courts Archive we do not update it to completion daily. So it is common that you may view a case and find that the details are more than 48 hours old. If so you will see a green prompt at the top of the page to trigger an immediate refresh of the data from the Courts Service.  It may take a moment but on page reload the page any updates will be available. 

Courtsdesk is designed to generate alerts and for tracking of High Court cases, or Circuit Court diaries. 

The simplest two options appear on every search result and profile page, for every High Court case. You will see this button:  
​

The Track button allows you to add that entity to your own Your Tracked Items. Tracked items can be found and managed on the tool bar, just look for this: 

By clicking the binoculars icon on your toolbar, you can manage and view what you've tracked. Tracked items also generate notifications. 

You will receive an email alert each morning gathering all notifications your Tracked items have generated in the last 24 hours. However, if you are logged in to Courtsdesk, notifications are available immediately via the notifications bell on your toolbar.

Courtsdesk is the first data service in the world to give corporate risk researchers the ability to search for or monitor names for High Court cases or prosecutions at scale. To use this bulk search and monitoring tool, first click on the Bulk Monitoring link in your toolbar. 

This tool allows you to first search, and then to monitor multiple names for mentions in High Court cases. Hundreds of thousands of names can be checked for new cases, or updates to existing cases, each day automatically. 

The tool performs three core functions: 

All monitoring is fully automated. Once you create a list of names the tool will do the rest. 

Any positive matches for the names on each list are delivered as spreadsheets - you download the spreadsheet to see the results. 

To create your first bulk monitoring list, navigate to the Bulk Monitoring management area. Follow the instructions to save your list as a CSV-formatted spreadsheet (see template available for download). 

After naming and uploading your list, the tool will perform an historical background search through all High Court cases for all the names on your list.  After a few moments the results will be available as a downloadable spreadsheet. 

The tool then checks for updates to existing cases, or for new cases involving the names in your list, each night. 

If there is a match or an update, you will receive a notification by email that morning with the subject line “Bulk Notifications”. 

See here for a demo video on bulk monitoring.

Let us know if this article was helpful below!