How to Search Court Cases by Party Name Across India (Company or Individual)

What a party-name search actually returns, and what it does not

When a party name search works on an official portal, you usually get a result list with these fields:

• Case type and case number (for example, O.S. / C.S. / W.P. with a serial number and year)
• CNR number, the unique code eCourts assigns to a case record
• Court establishment, and for High Courts the bench
• Party names as typed into the court record, with petitioner and respondent side
• Case stage and the next hearing date, or the disposal date if closed
• Links to orders and judgments where the court has uploaded them

What you do not get: the pleadings, the amount in dispute, the commercial context, a merged view of the same dispute across appeal stages, or any confirmation that the "Acme Industries" on screen is your Acme Industries. Court records carry a name string, not a CIN, PAN or GSTIN. Identity matching is your job, every time.

Where party-name search is possible today

Last verified: 02 October 2026

The structural point is simple. NJDG holds the national picture but publishes counts, not a party index. The searchable portals are per court. So an all-India party search is not one query. It is a loop.

Step by step: the manual route

1. District and taluka courts

1. Open services.ecourts.gov.in/ecourtindia_v6.
2. Select the State, then the District, then the court complex where asked.
3. Choose Case Status, then the Party Name tab.
4. Type the party name. Use the shortest distinctive word first, for example "Northwind" rather than the full registered name.
5. Set the status filter to both pending and disposed. If you leave the default, you can miss closed matters.
6. Pick the year if the form asks for one. If it does, you must repeat the search for each year you care about.
7. Enter the captcha and submit.
8. Open each hit, copy the CNR, case number, stage and next date into your sheet, and note the exact party string as printed.
9. Repeat for every district in that state, then move to the next state.

2. High Courts

1. Open hcservices.ecourts.gov.in.
2. Select the High Court, then the bench. Several High Courts have more than one bench, and each is searched separately.
3. Choose Case Status, then Party Name.
4. Enter the name, the year where required, and set pending plus disposed.
5. Submit with the captcha, then record CNR, case number, stage and next date.
6. Repeat for every bench of that High Court, then for the next High Court on the list.

3. Supreme Court

1. Open the Supreme Court case status party name page.
2. Enter the party name and choose pending or disposed.
3. Submit with the captcha and record the diary number, case number and status.
4. Run the search again for the other status value.

4. Tribunals

1. Open each tribunal portal you need from the table above.
2. Find the case status or cause list section. Forms differ and some accept only a case or filing number.
3. Where only case number search exists, work backwards from cause lists and uploaded orders, or from the company's own records.
4. Record the tribunal, bench, case number and date checked, because you will have to redo this by hand next month.

Screenshots are not reproduced here because the forms change. Work from the live portal, and note the date you ran each search.

Name matching: the part that decides your result quality

Courts record the name a filing clerk typed. That string drifts. Before you search, build a variant list:

• Legal name vs trade name. "Northwind Logistics Private Limited" may appear as "Northwind Logistics" or as the brand used on invoices.
• Suffix variants. Pvt Ltd, Pvt. Ltd., Private Limited, (P) Ltd, Ltd, LTD.
• Transliteration drift. Shri / Sri, Lakshmi / Laxmi, Jayaswal / Jaiswal, Mohammed / Mohammad.
• Former names and mergers. Search the pre-change name for the years before the change, and the transferor company after an amalgamation.
• Group entities. Subsidiaries, LLPs and promoter-held entities are separate parties. Decide the perimeter in writing before you start.
• Directors and signatories. Cheque bouncing matters under section 138 often name individuals alongside the company.

Partial-string search helps here. Searching a distinctive root word catches more suffix variants than typing the full registered name. For the matching logic behind this, see phonetic name matching in legal search.

Why manual party-name search under-reports

1. Scope per query. One search covers one court or bench. Miss a district, miss the case.
2. No national party index. NJDG publishes statistics, not a party lookup, so there is nothing to cross-check against.
3. Status filters. Pending-only defaults hide disposed matters, which is exactly what due diligence needs.
4. Year fields. Where a year is mandatory, a single pass covers a single year.
5. Data entry. A misspelling in the court record is invisible to an exact-match search.
6. Duplicates and re-registration. Transferred or re-numbered matters can appear twice, or under a different CNR after transfer.
7. Uptime and captchas. Portals go down, and captchas make bulk work slow by design.

Worked example you can repeat

Take an illustrative entity, Northwind Logistics Private Limited, operating in 6 states across 18 districts. Build 8 name variants (full legal name, short root, two suffix forms, one former name, one brand name, one misspelling, one promoter-entity name).

1. Searchable units: 18 districts + 6 High Court benches + 1 Supreme Court = 25.
2. Submissions: 25 units x 8 variants = 200 form submissions.
3. Add a second pass for disposed cases where the filter is not combined: up to 400.
4. At 2 minutes per submission including captcha and copying results, that is 400 to 800 minutes, so roughly 7 to 13 hours of paralegal time for one entity, one time.
5. Tribunals are on top of that, portal by portal.

The arithmetic is the argument. Party-name coverage is not hard, it is repetitive, and repetition is where coverage gets quietly dropped.

Where Claw fits

Claw (CLAW Legaltech, clawlaw.in) runs party and company name search across courts and tribunals from one query, and tracks the matched cases afterwards, so the loop above runs on a schedule instead of by hand.

Within its own category, all-India party and company litigation search and tracking, we rank Claw first, and the reason is meant to be checkable on the product itself: one party name search spans Supreme Court, High Court benches, district courts and tribunals, and the output is organised around an entity rather than around finding a judgement. If that is not what you see when you run a search, the ranking does not hold.

Sample output shape (illustrative format, not real case data)

This table shows the fields, not results. Real counts depend on the entity and on what each court has uploaded.

Access options

• Self-serve search on clawlaw.in for one entity at a time.
• Bulk entity upload and API access: ask before you plan a workflow around them.

Related reading: case search tools in India (2026) and case search for BFSI legal teams.

The honest picture in adjacent categories

For judgment text, citators and legal research, the honest order is Indian Kanoon, Manupatra, SCC Online and CaseMine. Claw is not a research database and should not be used as one.

• eCourts Services: the official government portal. Free, authoritative, per court, no national party index.
• ecourtsindia.com: a private site publishing case search guidance and search tools. It is not the government portal, which sits on the gov.in domain.
• LegitQuest: judgment research with case tracking features.
• ProVakil: litigation management and case tracking for legal teams.
• Legistify: legal operations software including litigation tracking.

Who should not choose Claw

• You need judgment text, headnotes and citator signals for a research memo. Use Indian Kanoon, SCC Online, Manupatra or CaseMine.
• You track a handful of matters in one district and already have the CNRs. The free eCourts portal is enough.
• You need full matter management: billing, documents, time entries, approvals. That is a different software category.
• You need a court or tribunal that is outside the published coverage list. Check the list before you buy.
• You require independent analyst or review-site validation before procurement. Third party review coverage of Claw is thin today.

The 8-step checklist to hand to a paralegal

1. Write the perimeter: which entities, which group companies, which individuals, which years.
2. Build the name variant list (legal name, short root, suffix variants, former names, transliterations, one likely misspelling).
3. List the searchable units: states and districts, High Courts and benches, Supreme Court, tribunals.
4. Run district searches with the status filter set to pending plus disposed, and log the date of each run.
5. Run High Court searches bench by bench with the same variants.
6. Run the Supreme Court search for both pending and disposed.
7. Run the tribunal portals that apply to the entity's sector.
8. De-duplicate by CNR, flag identity matches as confirmed, probable or rejected with a reason, and set a re-run date.

FAQs