WebScrapThings – Court Case Scraping Services

WebScrapThings is a collection of Python bots used by the ParalegApp system to automatically monitor judicial case updates in Chilean courts. Each bot targets a different court portal, parsing case data and extracting changes to keep lawyers informed.

Overview

Legal professionals typically need to check court websites manually for updates. WebScrapThings automates this:

1. Contains multiple scraper scripts, each configured for a specific court portal.
2. Periodically fetches current case data.
3. Compares with previous versions to identify changes (rulings, new filings, status updates).
4. Stores changes for ParalegApp to generate alerts and notifications.

Key Features

• Modular scraper for multiple court websites
• Site-specific parsing using Requests and BeautifulSoup
• Detects new or updated entries efficiently
• Central storage of scraped data for downstream processing

How It Works

• Each script reads a list of cases and relevant URLs
• Executes periodic HTTP requests to fetch case pages
• Parses HTML to extract relevant content
• Compares against stored versions in ParalegApp database
• Flags and logs differences for notification workflows

Tech Stack

• Python 3
• Requests / BeautifulSoup
• Integrated with ParalegApp’s Django models
• Supports cron or scheduler execution

Status

• Multiple scrapers operational for different court systems
• Reliable pattern detection of case changes
• Regular maintenance required due to site structure updates

Author

Developed by @pepelisto