Removal and de-indexing requests

People sometimes ask us to take their name off an opinion. This page says what we do about it, so the answer is the same for everyone and you don't have to guess before writing.

The short version: we fix our own mistakes immediately and we act on a court order. We will not edit the court's opinion, and we hide a page from search engines only rarely.

Four different requests, four different answers

1. Something on our page is wrong

We fix it, always, and quickly. Our pages are assembled by software that reads the court's PDF, and software makes mistakes: a name attached to the wrong case, a docket number misparsed, a judge credited with an opinion they did not write. That is our error, not the court's record, and correcting it is simply owed.

This is the most important thing on this page. If a page says something untrue about you, tell us — report an error or email hello@docketdrift.com. You do not need to make an argument; just point at what is wrong.

The same applies with special urgency to anyone the court itself protected. Courts routinely refer to children and to victims of certain offenses by initials. If our processing has surfaced a name the court deliberately withheld, that is a serious bug. Tell us and we will act the same day.

2. A court sealed, expunged, or vacated the record

We remove it on being shown the order. If a court has sealed or expunged a matter, or ordered an opinion withdrawn, the record has changed and we should follow it. Send the order (a case number and date is usually enough for us to verify it ourselves).

We do this because our job is to reflect the public record accurately. An opinion a court has withdrawn is no longer part of it.

3. You want the page hidden from Google

Usually the answer is no. We can mark an individual page so search engines are asked not to list it, and we keep that ability for a narrow set of situations. But wanting an outcome to be less visible is not by itself one of them, and it is fairer to say so here than to decide it quietly, case by case, out of view.

The reason is what a complete record is for. A researcher can only rely on this corpus if what is missing from it is missing for a reason they can see. If we hid pages on request, the gaps would not be random — they would track who had the motivation and the wherewithal to ask. The record would bend, quietly and in one direction, toward whatever someone wanted hidden. We publish our coverage gaps precisely so nobody has to guess at them; a page hidden on request is a gap nobody could see.

We will still consider it, and the circumstances that actually move us are narrow:

• The matter resolved in your favor — an acquittal, a dismissal, a reversal — and the page does not make that clear.
• You were not the person whose conduct the court was ruling on: a witness, a bystander, a relative named in passing.
• Someone the court itself took care to protect. If that has happened, it is our bug — see the first section, and please tell us today.

Even then we may decline, and there is something worth knowing before you ask: appellate opinions are published by the court itself and mirrored by other services. We are usually not the only place and often not the first, so hiding one site may change very little. We would rather tell you that than take an action that leaves you believing a problem is solved.

4. You want the opinion removed, or your name edited out of it

We decline.

A published appellate opinion is the court's own account of what it decided and why. It is a public record, published by the court, and it is not ours to rewrite. Editing a party's name out of an opinion would leave a document that looks like the court's words but is not, which is the one thing this project exists not to do — everything here is the court's text, unaltered, and that promise is worth nothing if it has exceptions.

If you believe the opinion itself is wrong, that is a matter for the court that issued it, not for us. We cannot correct a judicial record and would be wrong to try.

Writing to us

Email hello@docketdrift.com. Please include the docket number and the link to the page. If you are asking under category 2 or 3, tell us which and say briefly why — a few sentences from you is worth more than a formal-sounding letter, and we read every one.

We may ask you to verify that you are who you say you are before acting on a request about a named person. We are not trying to make it difficult; we simply have no way to know, and acting on an unverified request about someone else's name would be its own harm.

We answer, and we tell you the actual reason. We do not promise a timeline — this is a small project — except in category 1, which we treat as urgent.

What this page is not

This is not legal advice, and it is not a statement about anyone's legal rights. It is a description of what we do, published so it is predictable. DocketDrift is a United States project publishing United States public court records.

One thing worth separating, because both get called privacy: our privacy statement is a promise about people who use this site — we never store what you searched. This page is about people named in the opinions. They are genuinely different questions, and the strength of the first does not depend on the second.

— DocketDrift