Why can't I find trial court judicial opinions?
I find it really hard to find opinions on the state trial court level across the nation. I am not sure where to look for those cases and I wonder if there may be more cases available for some states than the other.
Answer
I am not surprised that you found it difficult to find trial court opinions for a practical reason that doesn't really get discussed outside of an advanced research class. Trial court opinions have no precedential value on anyone but the parties to that case. This means that, because there are thousands of opinions that come out every day, no publisher has an incentive to get them published or put them on Lexis/Westlaw/etc. Another issue, which you may have seen in your research, is that when you're looking at a docket (the place where all documents filed in a case are logged), the court itself isn't calling the document where a judge makes legal findings an "opinion". It's usually called something else, and is then followed by another document called a judgement, which is typically super short and just contains the legal action that comes out of the judges/jury's decision.
There are definitely going to be some states that have more of these trial court-level (also called "courts of first impression") materials. It's all up to the court administrators in that state and whether they have the IT staffing, funding, and inclination to make these public records easily available for people to access. Most state courts of first impression will have an e-filing system for lawyers. In Washington, lawyers have to apply for access to this system at the court level (usually run by the county superior courts). Once the clerk of that court approves the attorney's access, they can use the Odyssey filing system to both file AND access full text dockets and filings for all non-sealed documents coming out of that court. Up until April of this year, Odyssey documents were accessible to anyone using the system. But they had some sort of mysterious data breach and have taken down their public full-text access capability for the foreseeable future.
If you really want to get access to court filings, you're going to have to go court by court, on their websites, to see what their database access rules are. Some courts will give you the ability to access dockets only (a list of all of the filings in a case, but not access to the documents themselves) while others will give you access to full-text document filings for a specific time period. Other courts have nothing. If you are not able to get access to full-text documents via the court's website, they often direct you to the clerk's office for that court where you can pay to request that they scan copies for you. Because most of these documents are technically public information, your final option would be to go to the courthouse in person and ask to see a specific file for copying (or they'll have a kiosk for the public to search and access the locked down database, which is typically only available to practicing attorneys).
Another option is Bloomberg Law which has connections with many state courts e-filing systems and uploads those documents into its database. Unfortunately, it's pretty hit or miss on Bloomberg. For example, I was looking for a Spokane County Superior Court case's documents earlier this week. Bloomberg says that it has full-text current access to documents from Spokane County Superior Court. But when I ran a search, it was clear that the database hadn't been updated since 2020.
The final wrinkle to all of this is that even if you're able to access full-text court filings at the trial court level, it is unlikely that the court has set up their database to be full-text searchable. So you'll be able to locate a case based on party name, type of case (criminal, civil, etc), date of filing, type of document filed, etc. Perhaps even the charge. But you won't be able to find cases through searching in the same way that we can search appellate or supreme court opinions on Lexis and Westlaw.
I'm wondering if you are interested in discussing your research with a librarian more--if we knew a little more about what the underlying purpose of your research was, we could help you navigate court websites or generate other ideas about how to get to the data you're looking for. We're happy to help you with this stuff, even if it's related to your summer job and not an academic pursuit. Just let us know. You can use the "schedule appointment" button on our page for law students.