How to Search Court Records in Mexico
Reviewed 1 October 2026.
A litigation search in the United States starts with PACER, moves to the state dockets and ends with an aggregator that has already indexed both. In Mexico the same question, whether a company or a person is or has been in litigation, has to be put to each court system separately. There is one federal judiciary and there are 32 state judiciaries, one for each of the 31 states and one for Mexico City, and each keeps its own records in its own system. No index joins them, and the systems that do exist identify the parties by name alone.
That is why a Mexican litigation search is investigative work rather than a database query. It is one of the records checks in due diligence in Mexico, and one of the more revealing: a company's court disputes with its suppliers, its former employees and the tax authority are often on the public record before they show in its accounts.
Federal courts, 32 state judiciaries and a reform that changed who runs them
The federal judiciary is headed by the Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación (the Supreme Court) and works through collegiate circuit courts, collegiate appeal courts and district courts (Juzgados de Distrito). The judicial reform published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación (the DOF, the federal gazette) on 15 September 2024 made federal judges elected, reduced the Supreme Court to nine members, and replaced the Consejo de la Judicatura Federal with an Órgano de Administración Judicial (OAJ) for administration and a Tribunal de Disciplina Judicial for discipline (Article 94). The first elected judges took office on 1 September 2025.
For a records search the consequence is practical. The federal judiciary's portal is now oaj.gob.mx, the docket systems are the ones the Consejo built, and the federal courts sit in 32 judicial circuits, numbered from the Primer Circuito in Mexico City, one per state save for a few municipalities assigned to a neighboring state's circuit. Article 100 lets the OAJ change the number, territory and specialization of the courts, so the map can move.
The state courts are a separate world. Under Article 116 of the Constitution each state's judicial power is exercised by the courts its own constitution establishes: a Tribunal Superior de Justicia at the top, first-instance courts beneath it, and a case system, a bulletin and an archive of its own. The 2024 reform also requires the states to elect their judges and to create their own disciplinary and administrative bodies, so several state systems are changing at the same time as the federal one.
Which court hears what
A search that looks in the wrong court finds nothing and reports it as a clean result.
Commercial and civil disputes
Commercial law is federal, but Article 104 section II of the Constitution lets the plaintiff choose: where only private interests are affected, a dispute over the application of federal law may be brought "a elección del actor", at the plaintiff's election, before the ordinary state courts instead of the federal courts. That concurrent jurisdiction sends most supplier suits, unpaid-invoice claims and contract disputes to the state courts. A commercial search therefore covers both the state courts where the company sits and the federal district courts of the same circuit. Civil matters under the state civil codes, including property, leases and family disputes, are state matters.
Amparo
Amparo is the constitutional action against acts of authority that violate rights, and under Article 103 of the Constitution and Article 33 of the Ley de Amparo it is heard by the federal courts, and by state courts only in the cases that law provides. The route matters for a search. An amparo against a law or an administrative act, the amparo indirecto, goes to a district court or a collegiate appeal court (Article 35), and a company that has fought the tax authority, a regulator or a municipal permit decision usually appears there as the quejoso, the complainant. An amparo against a final judgment, the amparo directo, goes to a collegiate circuit court (Article 34), so a search of the district courts alone misses it.
Labor
Labor disputes used to go to conciliation and arbitration boards, the Juntas de Conciliación y Arbitraje, which sat outside the judiciary. The constitutional reform published on 24 February 2017 moved them to labor courts inside the federal and state judiciaries and made conciliation a compulsory first step. The amendment of the Ley Federal del Trabajo published on 1 May 2019 provided for the Centro Federal de Conciliación y Registro Laboral (CFCRL) for federal matters, with local conciliation centers for the rest. The new system was switched on in three stages: eight states on 18 November 2020, thirteen on 3 November 2021, and the last eleven, including Mexico City, Jalisco and Nuevo León, on 3 October 2022 (CFCRL institutional program, DOF 24 April 2026). Cases filed with the old boards stay there until they are resolved. A labor search therefore covers the labor courts and the legacy board files, and a dispute settled at conciliation reaches neither.
Insolvency, tax and criminal matters
Insolvency is federal. Article 17 of the Ley de Concursos Mercantiles gives a concurso mercantil, the Mexican reorganization and liquidation proceeding, to the district judge with jurisdiction over the merchant's domicile. Since 7 March 2022 two specialist district courts in Mexico City, the Juzgados Primero y Segundo de Distrito en Materia de Concursos Mercantiles, have held that jurisdiction for the whole country, and the district courts that already had concursos kept them (Acuerdo General 4/2022 of the Consejo de la Judicatura Federal). A search limited to the courts of the company's home state can therefore miss a recent concurso. The judiciary also has a specialist institute for these proceedings, the Instituto Federal de Especialistas de Concursos Mercantiles (IFECOM).
Disputes with federal authorities over tax assessments and administrative fines go to the Tribunal Federal de Justicia Administrativa (TFJA), an autonomous tribunal outside the judiciary (Articles 1 and 3 of its organic law). A juicio de nulidad, an annulment action, before the TFJA is the usual route for a company contesting a SAT assessment, often alongside an amparo.
Criminal procedure is national under the Código Nacional de Procedimientos Penales, but its Article 20 sends federal offenses to the federal courts, save where the law makes jurisdiction concurrent, and everything else to the state courts of the place where the act occurred. Most criminal matters are state matters. Whether any of it is visible to a third party is answered below.
What the federal judiciary puts online
The OAJ publishes the federal docket services on oaj.gob.mx. Three of them matter.
The Consulta de Datos de Expedientes is the docket lookup. The OAJ describes it as a way to follow a matter in full: you choose the circuit and identify the case, and the system returns the entries recorded for that file.
The Lista de Acuerdos is the daily list of decisions posted on the public notice boards (estrados) of every district and circuit court, and the OAJ publishes the lists online. In amparo each entry gives the case number, the complainant's name and the authority (Article 29 of the Ley de Amparo), so the lists, read court by court and day by day, are where a name turns up.
The Sentencias versión pública service gives access to public versions of the judgments of the circuit and district courts, and the Supreme Court publishes its own on its website. The Portal de Servicios en Línea, where parties read their electronic files, requires a digital signature such as the FIREL and is for the parties, not the public.
What the state courts publish, and why Mexico City is not Querétaro
Every state judiciary publishes a daily judicial bulletin (boletín judicial) or list of decisions (lista de acuerdos) carrying the case number and the parties for each decision. That is where names appear. What varies is whether a state has built a search on top of it.
The Poder Judicial de la Ciudad de México publishes its Boletín Judicial as daily documents that can be browsed by date range, with no party-name field, and offers a separate search by case number. A name search in Mexico City means reading the daily bulletins, which is what commercial bulletin-monitoring services do.
The Poder Judicial del Estado de Querétaro publishes its lists of decisions for the first and second instance, searched by district, court and case number. There is no name field. It also links a public judgments page and a digitized historical archive.
In Jalisco the Supremo Tribunal de Justicia offers consultation of its chambers' decisions by case number within a chosen chamber, with no name field, and the Consejo de la Judicatura publishes the judicial bulletin separately on its own portal.
The pattern holds in all three. Their systems are built for the parties and their lawyers, who already know the case number. A third party searching by name works from the bulletins for the period they cover, and from the court itself for anything older.
The transparency law requires a public version of every judgment
The new Ley General de Transparencia y Acceso a la Información Pública, published in the DOF on 20 March 2025, requires every federal and state judiciary to publish "las versiones públicas de todas las sentencias y laudos emitidas", the public versions of all its judgments and awards, together with its daily lists of decisions (Article 69, sections II and V). The obligation is not new. It was Article 73, section II of the 2015 law, as amended in 2020. The duty is to publish. It does not make judgments searchable by party name.
A versión pública is the document with the classified parts removed (Article 3, section XXI), and Article 115 classifies as confidential, with no time limit, the personal data of an identified or identifiable natural person. The consequence for a search is direct. A company's name is not personal data, so it often survives in a public judgment, unless the court removes it on another ground. An individual's name is, so it is generally removed, and a public judgment against a person shows the case number, the court and the reasoning but not the name. Courts redact unevenly, which makes a search of public judgments for a person's name unreliable. The daily lists are different: they name the parties, because their purpose is notification, except in matters the court keeps confidential.
Registers a docket search will not reach
A concurso mercantil appears in a court docket under a case number and is easy to miss there, so the commercial registry and the DOF, where the judgment must be registered and published (Articles 43 and 45 of the Ley de Concursos Mercantiles), are checked separately.
The TFJA publishes public versions of its judgments through its Consulta de Versiones Públicas, which searches by words, case number, dates, region and chamber. There is no party field, and a word search finds a company only where its public version has not redacted the name.
PROFECO, the federal consumer protection agency, runs the Buró Comercial, a public register of consumer complaints against suppliers, searched by trade name or registered name and covering complaints from 1 January 2019. Its own notice says it shows only complaints that have concluded or can lawfully be disclosed, gives no names of individuals and says nothing about complaints still in progress. CONDUSEF, the financial consumer protection commission, runs the Buró de Entidades Financieras, which records complaints, sanctions and abusive contract clauses for each bank, insurer and lender. It is the register to check when the counterparty is a regulated financial entity. Complaints and sanctions are reported as what they are, not counted as lawsuits.
Alimony debtors in default are recorded in the Registro Nacional de Obligaciones Alimentarias, created by Article 135 Bis of the Ley General de los Derechos de Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes in a reform published on 8 May 2023, and some states, Mexico City among them, keep registers of their own.
Criminal investigation files are not public. Article 218 of the national criminal procedure code makes the carpeta de investigación, the prosecutor's file, "estrictamente reservados", strictly reserved, with access for the parties only. A public version is released only of a decision not to prosecute or to archive, and only after a period equal to the limitation period of the offense, never less than three years or more than twelve. A complaint against a company or a person stays invisible to a third party until a judge is involved. Our article on background checks in Mexico covers criminal records.
Why there is no national litigation search
There is no national index of state court cases, and the state and federal systems do not share one. Within each system the parties are generally identified by name only: two surnames for a person, the registered name for a company, no tax number and no date of birth. Common names return homonyms, misspellings return nothing, older matters are on paper in the court archive, and courts in smaller municipalities may publish nothing electronically. A hit shows that a case exists, not what was decided, a point our due diligence checklist article develops.
How a defensible search is done
Fix the names first
The search is only as good as the list of names. For a company that means the exact registered name, its former names from the commercial registry (see how to verify a Mexican company), its trade names, its affiliates, and the people who own and control it where the risk sits with them (see beneficial ownership in Mexico). For an individual it means the full name with both surnames, spellings with and without accents, and any variant used in business. Every hit under a variant is tied back to the subject with a second identifier, an address, a co-party or a date, before it is reported. A hit the identifiers cannot resolve is reported as unconfirmed.
Choose the jurisdictions that can hold the case
The domicile in the incorporation deed, the places where the company operates, the state where its assets are and the counterparty's home state each have their own courts. Add the federal district courts of the same circuits for amparo and federal commercial suits, the collegiate circuit courts for amparo against judgments, the specialist insolvency courts in Mexico City for concursos opened since 7 March 2022 and the local district courts for older ones, the TFJA for tax, and the labor courts and legacy boards for employment claims. Where the question is what a judgment debtor owns, the jurisdictions follow the assets, which is asset tracing rather than a litigation search. A search plan that names the jurisdictions searched, and the ones left out, is what makes the result defensible.
Search the systems, then go to the court
The electronic systems come first: the bulletins and lists of decisions for the period they cover, the state lookups, the federal lists and the specialized registers. Where a system returns only a case number and a one-line entry, someone has to go to the court, usually local counsel or an investigator, to read the lists posted there for dates that are not online and to obtain the public version of the judgment once it is issued. The transparency law opens the lists and the judgments, not the file, and the federal portal's electronic files need a digital signature such as the FIREL. Where a matter is material, certified copies (copias certificadas) are obtained where the client has standing to request them. This is work a private investigator in Mexico does in person, and it cannot be done from a desk abroad.
Report the status as a fact
Each hit is reported with the case number, the court, the parties and their roles, the type of proceeding, the subject, the date of the last entry and the status: active, archived, judgment issued, on appeal or under amparo. "Archived" does not mean the subject won, or that a claim failed on its merits. "Litigation found" is not a finding. Neither is "no litigation found" unless the report says which courts were searched, under which names, for which period, and which could not be reached.
Reading what you find
A case is not a finding of wrongdoing. A lawsuit can be an unpaid invoice, a dismissal claim, a tax dispute or a company collecting its own debts, and the subject's role in it decides what it means.
Labor claims are the most common hits against an operating company and the easiest to misread. In federal matters most individual disputes now settle at the conciliation center and never reach a docket: the CFCRL reports that the share of individual disputes settled before it rose from 67 percent in 2021 to 72 percent in 2024. A labor court docket shows only the disputes that did not settle, so several open claims in the same period mean more disputes than the count suggests, and a cluster from one plant or one year says something about how the company treats its staff. A legacy board file that has been open for years is ordinary.
Commercial suits by suppliers are a solvency signal. A juicio ejecutivo mercantil, the fast-track collection suit on a promissory note or similar instrument, filed by a supplier or a bank means a creditor holding a signed instrument says the company stopped paying, and two or three in a year say more than a set of accounts. The roles matter: a company that is always the plaintiff collecting from customers is a different case from one that is always the defendant.
Amparo proceedings against the SAT are frequent and often procedural. They show a dispute with the tax authority, which may be routine or may be an assessment large enough to matter. The docket entry does not say which. The public judgment, from the federal court or the TFJA, may.
Criminal complaints that never became cases cannot be checked in any public record, whether a company says it filed one against a former director or a person says one against him was dismissed. A criminal matter with a business counterparty as the accused is a question for a fraud investigation, not a records search.
Absence of hits means the names searched did not appear in the systems searched for the period they cover. It does not mean there are no disputes: arbitration, conciliation, municipal courts, paper archives and an unchecked name variant all sit outside the result.
Personal data limits what can be reported about an individual
A firm that collects and reports litigation information about a person is processing personal data under the Ley Federal de Protección de Datos Personales en Posesión de los Particulares, the private-sector data protection law rewritten in 2025 and in force since 21 March 2025. The workable rule is to report what the public record shows, for the purpose the client has stated: the case number, the court, the role and the status of a proceeding in which the person is a party, taken from the lists of decisions and the public judgments, not the contents of a file the searcher had no standing to read. Consent and purpose for reports on individuals are covered in the background check article.
Where we come in
Warden Consulting was founded in 1995 and runs litigation searches on Mexican companies and individuals as part of due diligence in Mexico, from its office in the World Trade Center in Mexico City, with investigating lawyers and investigators working in the states where the records sit. Our searches cover the federal docket, the state courts that matter to the decision, the labor, insolvency and administrative systems and the specialized registers, and every material hit is confirmed at the court, against its lists and any public judgment, before it is reported. The report states what was searched, under which names, for which period, and what could not be reached. To find out whether a Mexican counterparty is in litigation, contact our Mexico City office.
Frequently asked questions
Are Mexican court records public?
Partly. Every federal and state court must publish public versions of its judgments and its daily lists of decisions, and the lists generally name the parties. The case file itself is not among what the courts must publish, personal data is removed from the public judgments, and criminal investigation files are reserved by law.
Can I search Mexican court records online?
Yes, court by court. The federal judiciary publishes a docket lookup by case, daily lists of decisions and public judgments, and each state judiciary publishes its own bulletin. Most lookups run on the case number rather than a name, so an online name search usually means reading the bulletins, and older matters are on paper at the court.
Is there a national litigation database in Mexico?
No. There is no national index of state court cases and no link between the state systems and the federal one. Commercial services index the bulletins of some courts, which helps with monitoring but is not a complete record, and any result has to be confirmed at the court.
How do I find out if a Mexican company has been sued?
Fix the exact registered name and its former names. Then search the bulletins and lookups of the states where the company is domiciled and operates, the federal district and collegiate circuit courts of the same circuits, the specialist insolvency courts in Mexico City and, for concursos opened before 7 March 2022, the local district courts, the labor courts and legacy boards, the TFJA, and the PROFECO and CONDUSEF registers where they apply. Confirm each hit at the court, and record what was searched as well as what was found.
Can I see someone's criminal record in Mexico?
Not as a third party. Investigation files are strictly reserved under Article 218 of the national criminal procedure code, and the federal criminal-record certificate is issued only in the cases the law lists. What can be established is whether a person is a party to a criminal proceeding before a judge, and even that record is limited. A reference to a criminal case is not proof of a conviction.
How long does a litigation search in Mexico take?
A search on one company or one individual usually takes four to five business days. A group operating in several states, a common name or a request for certified copies takes longer, because each hit has to be resolved against the identifiers and confirmed at the court.
This article is general information, not legal advice.