What is Court Data New Zealand?

Court Data New Zealand provides a totally unique search option for historic New Zealand court list records for:
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• The New Zealand Supreme Court
• The New Zealand High Court
• The New Zealand Court of Appeal

The information provided is not available from any other public search resource.

The above New Zealand courts publish a list of matters that are to be heard in that court on that day.  In most cases, that daily court list is then replaced by the matters to be heard on the following day. 

Those older court list matters can now be searched by a person's name or that of a business or other entity name using the CDNZ Database.

How it all started

​In 2012 we commenced collecting (mostly PDF based) data from the daily court lists published by the Australian courts. At the time we had been operating as an investigation agency for well over 20 years and believed this data was potentially of significant value. We also knew that unless it was collected daily it would disappear with each days court list replacing the previous days data.

So, for the next several years, several hours of each day were spent downloading and collating all the available daily court lists.  As courts updated to proper online databases, things improved.  As additional courts also started publishing daily court lists online, they too were also collected.  

In 2014 we had set up a very rudimentary online database.  Constant improvements and updates were made and in 2020 the current Court Data Australia database went live with almost 20 million criminal and civil records.
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​The New Zealand connection

Since 2018 we have also been collecting the online New Zealand court data for the three higher New Zealand courts.  This was, and still is, in a PDF based format.  

Unfortunately, the New Zealand courts system does not publish daily court lists online for the District Courts and this information is not available in the Court Data New Zealand database.

​We initially attempted to convert the NZ court PDFs into usable CSV data and included all relevant information relating to each record such as the case file numbers, the judicial officer involved, matter types, etc.  It eventually became obvious this was just too onerous as, due to the PDFs being so badly formatted, too many errors were being made. 

We eventually concentrated our efforts in converting the basics - the date, court type and case title.  The names of individuals were then separated (so they could be searched separately, as well as the case title for business and other entity names) and URL links were provided so the original PDF could be accessed and the listing could be see as it was published on that date.

We hope you find the Court Data New Zealand database useful. 

Please feel free to contact us should you have any feedback, comments or suggestions.

Joe Fuller
CEO | JFA (Aust) Pty Ltd t/a Court Data Australia