By David Thompson
Publication Date: 2026-09-28 07:40:00
A dismissed lawsuit or an old criminal case can follow a name for years. The court record itself may sit quietly in a county database. The problem is the copies. Sites that republish court filings rank well on Google, and they often show up on page one for a person’s name.
The good news is that these copies are among the easiest negative search results to deal with, according to Erase.com’s 2026 removal data. Government pages and press releases are harder. Below is what sealing and expungement actually do and what the record sites will remove, along with what the data shows about timing.
Where Court Records Show Up Online
Most people find their case in one of four places:
- Official court portals. State and county courts post dockets, and federal records sit in PACER, which charges $0.10 per page.
- Record aggregator sites. Sites like CourtListener, Justia, Trellis, UniCourt, CaseMine, and vLex copy filings and make them searchable. CourtListener, for example, builds much of its federal…
