How to Track Cases in the Kerala High Court
This guide is for chambers and law firms with a Kerala High Court practice, and for teams outside Kochi who instruct counsel there. The court sits only at Ernakulam — no circuit or regional benches — with jurisdiction over Kerala and the Union Territory of Lakshadweep.
Below: which portals hold what, how to search them, and the quirks that waste a junior's morning. The court runs its own systems on keralacourts.in. Treat those as primary; the national eCourts portal mirrors them and adds one field the court's pages omit.
Where the Kerala High Court publishes case data
Kerala High Court — case-status hub
https://hckinfo.keralacourts.in/digicourt/Casedetailssearch
The richest source: eight case-status tabs (case number, FIR, party, advocate, filing number, Act, case type and caveat — the caveat search sits outside the Casedetailssearch path, at /digicourt/Caveatsearch), nine order and judgment searches, and the cause list. A captcha guards nearly every status and order search, so bulk checking is manual.
Cause list
https://hckinfo.keralacourts.in/digicourt/Casedetailssearch/viewCauselist
Date-wise lists as PDFs, with shortcut buttons for recent dates and no captcha. With its companion advocate-wise search, the most useful page on the site for a chamber.
Orders and judgments
https://hckinfo.keralacourts.in/digicourt/Casedetailssearch/Ordercaseno
Orders and judgments live under the same hub, searchable by case number, order date, party name, judge and neutral citation. The CR Judgment search — judge, case type, date range — is the one for reportable judgments. Two Malayalam searches sit alongside: Malayalam judgments and the Malayalam ILR series, a corpus distinct from the English ILR. None of them searches the body of a judgment.
e-Services
https://ecourt.keralacourts.in/
Certified and online copies, e-gate pass, e-sewa tokens, and the court display board. E-filing is separate, at filing.keralacourts.in.
eCourts High Court Services — Kerala
https://hcservices.ecourts.gov.in/ecourtindiaHC/index_highcourt.php?state_cd=4&dist_cd=1&stateNm=Kerala
The national mirror, useful above all for one thing: its case-details panel shows the CNR number, which the court's portal does not surface. It is slower, has no CNR search box for High Courts, and is intermittently flaky — its cause-list endpoint, highcourt_causelist.php, threw a SQLSTATE[08006] timeout expired / Connection Failed once during research, then five clean retries.
eCourts Judgment & Order Search
https://judgments.ecourts.gov.in/pdfsearch/index.php
Free-text keyword, phrase and proximity search across three corpora — Supreme Court, High Court and SCR — set from the court-type dropdown. Its twenty-entry language selector filters to judgments available in translation, Malayalam among them; it does not translate the search.
Step-by-step: tracking a case
- 1
Search by case number
At hckinfo.keralacourts.in/digicourt/Casedetailssearch/Statuscaseno, pick the case type, enter the number and four-digit year, solve the captcha, search. That dropdown carries roughly 356 entries: WP(C), WA, Crl.MC, Crl.Rev.Pet, Bail Appl., MACA, RSA and dozens of near-identical variants. Pick the wrong sibling and you get a clean "no record" rather than an error.
- 2
Search by party name
Statuspartyname takes the name, a Pending / Disposed / Both radio, and a From–To date range, plus a captcha. The range is mandatory and capped at one year — the page's own script refuses anything longer — so several years means walking back in successive twelve-month windows, a fresh captcha each time.
- 3
Get the CNR
Neither portal has a CNR search box. Work the other way: find the case by number or party on eCourts HC Services (hcservices.ecourts.gov.in), open the result, and read the 16-character CNR off the Case Details panel. Record it once — it never changes, even when the case is renumbered.
- 4
Search by filing number
Statusfileno is for a freshly e-filed matter not yet numbered — the right search between filing and registration.
- 5
Search by advocate
Statusadvname is not free text: pick the advocate from the autocomplete, which posts the court's advocate code — a hand-typed name that misses the index returns nothing. Then choose Pending / Disposed / Both, supply a range of at most one year, and clear a captcha.
Case types you will get wrong
The case-type dropdown at Statuscaseno carries roughly 356 entries, and the wrong sibling returns a clean "no record" rather than an error. These are the codes that come up most, with the variants that catch people out.
| Code | Type | Confusable with |
|---|---|---|
| WP(C) | Writ Petition (Civil) | UNNUMB.WP(C), for a matter e-filed but not yet numbered — and the dozens of near-identical variants sitting beside it in the same dropdown |
| WA | Writ Appeal | UNNUMB.WA; also WP(C), which is the petition itself rather than the appeal against its judgment |
| Crl.MC | Criminal Miscellaneous Case | Crl.Rev.Pet — both sit in the criminal block of the dropdown and read alike at a glance |
| Crl.Rev.Pet | Criminal Revision Petition | Crl.MC |
| Bail Appl. | Bail Application | The criminal miscellaneous types, Crl.MC in particular |
| MACA | Motor Accident Claims Appeal | Its near-identical siblings in the dropdown — check the exact string before searching |
| RSA | Regular Second Appeal | UNNUMB.RSA |
| UNNUMB.WP(C) | Un-numbered Writ Petition (Civil) — e-filed, not yet numbered | WP(C) |
| UNNUMB.WA | Un-numbered Writ Appeal | WA |
| UNNUMB.RSA | Un-numbered Regular Second Appeal | RSA |
The parallel UNNUMB. set exists because e-filing has been mandatory since 1 January 2022, and a matter can sit un-numbered while the registry raises defects. Track one of those by filing number, and watch the Stamp Notice board at hckinfo.keralacourts.in/digicourt/Stampnoticeboard, searchable by date range, for objections to cure.
Downloading orders and judgments
Search by case number at hckinfo.keralacourts.in/digicourt/Casedetailssearch/Ordercaseno and download the PDF, past a captcha. Sweeping a period is better done from Orderdate, which takes a From–To range and filters to Judgments/Orders, Interim Orders or Both, restricts to reportable judgments and narrows by advocate.
Judgments carry a neutral citation in the form 2026:KER:40260, and the Citation search takes it directly. Reported decisions are indexed at ilrkerala.gov.in, but its judgment search is behind a free registration and login; the Index of Reported Judgments is open if you just want the list. The court also keeps a captcha-free Matter of Public Importance list of significant judgments with citations, at /Casedetailssearch/Publicmatter.
Portal copies are not certified; apply for a certified copy through ecourt.keralacourts.in, which handles application and payment.
Cause lists
Open viewCauselist, pick a date from the month/day/year dropdowns — or use a shortcut button — and the list arrives as a PDF. Records go back to 2018: 31 August 2018 still returns over a hundred bench rows with working links.
Format: one PDF per bench per list type — Daily List, Today List, Weekly list, Monthly List, Part Two, Separate List 1–6, Chamber list 1–5, Hearing List, CJ's Court, plus per-hall entries like "3B COURT". One bench often has several on a date, at different sitting times. A consolidated View Entire List (Daily) PDF appears on some dates only — 778 pages, 5.5 MB on 20 August 2026.
Each is headed "IN THE HIGH COURT OF KERALA AT ERNAKULAM", then a line with the day, the Gregorian and Malayalam-era dates and the sitting time ("Thursday , 20th August , 2026 / 29th Sravana, 1948 04:00 PM"), then Before: the judge or venue, then the table: Sr.No., Case Number, Main Parties, Petitioner/Respondent, Advocate's. No time column — the sitting time is in the header only.
The results table carries a Published Time column: on a normal working day the next day's lists timestamp to the previous afternoon or evening — those for 20 August 2026 went up on 19 August, roughly 2:06 to 7:13 PM. Check it rather than a rule of thumb: in the Onam recess whole days carried no lists though the shortcut buttons still offered those dates.
Advance lists exist, but the date picker will not find them: they appear as a banner link at the top of viewCauselist — one for 10 September 2026 before the High Court Mediation Centre — straight to a PDF, while that date in the form returns nothing.
The PDFs are real text, not scans, so Ctrl-F works. And Advocatesearch beats reading a full list: a date plus the advocate's name returns just their matters, no captcha.
Quirks specific to the Kerala High Court
Get the domain right
hckerala.gov.in, the court's own former primary domain, no longer resolves; a notice on ecourt.keralacourts.in confirms the site is down and NIC working on it. Treat links there as temporarily dead, not wrong. hckinfo.kerala.gov.in still redirects correctly to hckinfo.keralacourts.in, but on an expired TLS certificate, so browsers block it first; other government sites, ilrkerala.gov.in included, still point at it. Use highcourt.kerala.gov.in for the main site — heavy at 2.5 MB, and slow — and hckinfo.keralacourts.in for case data.
"ONLINE" and "OFFLINE" in a cause list are not hearing modes
The court's own note is explicit: the marking is mode of filing, ONLINE for e-filed and OFFLINE for physically filed. The PDFs print it per item as Filing Mode: ONLINE or Filing Mode: OFFLINE, so "Filing Mode:" is the string to Ctrl-F. Hearing mode lives in the same table's separate VC Request and VC Details columns.
Un-numbered filings have their own case types
The dropdown carries a parallel UNNUMB. set — UNNUMB.WP(C), UNNUMB.WA, UNNUMB.RSA. E-filing has been mandatory since 1 January 2022, and a matter can sit un-numbered while the registry raises defects: track it by filing number, and watch the Stamp Notice board at hckinfo.keralacourts.in/digicourt/Stampnoticeboard, searchable by date range, for objections to cure.
Malayalam: judgments, not cause lists
Cause lists are English only, names transliterated. Judgments are the Malayalam corpus: Kerala is widely reported as the first High Court to publish decisions in a regional language, from February 2023, though Delhi, Bombay and Allahabad were publishing vernacular judgments then too. Bulk translation now uses Anuvadini, an AICTE tool. Search at /Casedetailssearch/Malayalamorders, headed മലയാളം വിധിന്യായം. Cite the English original; the Malayalam is a client-facing version.
Advocate names are entered inconsistently
The consolidated list for 20 August 2026 mixes SRI., SHRI. and SMT. prefixes — over a thousand of each of the first two in its opening 160 pages — with mixed-case entries like "Jacob P. Alex(Amicus Curiae)". Name matching has to be fuzzy; case numbers and CNRs are exact.
Court halls are lettered, not just numbered
The display board at ecourt.keralacourts.in/digicourt/Courtdisplay/smarttvdat runs CJ, then 1A through 8C by floor and letter, with gaps — so a client's "Court 3" is ambiguous.
Don't rely on the SMS
The court sends free listing alerts and claims about 98% delivery, but its own disclaimer tells advocates to verify on the website. A nudge, not a record.
Suo motu is broken, not withdrawn
The court still links it from its own hub menu, but /Casedetailssearch/Suomotu has returned a server error on every attempt across sessions.
The district side is separate
Lakshadweep matters list at Ernakulam like any other, the UT having no High Court. Kerala's subordinate courts, though, are absent from the High Court portal: use eCourts district services or a site like ernakulam.dcourts.gov.in.
Common questions
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