Virginia Circuit Court Case Information: How to Search It

Virginia circuit court case information is published by the Commonwealth’s judiciary through its online case information system, and it covers circuit court cases only: felony charges, civil suits over $100, and appeals from the district courts. A traffic ticket or a misdemeanor is not in it. Those are general district court cases, searched through a separate system.

That single split causes most of the failed searches. A driver who was ticketed in Chesterfield and searches the circuit court records finds nothing, concludes the case has vanished, and misses a court date. Nothing has vanished — the case is in the other system.

Virginia runs two case information searches, not one

The Supreme Court of Virginia’s Office of the Executive Secretary maintains the online case information systems for the Commonwealth’s courts, and the judiciary’s own case status and information pages are the front door to them. Circuit court records and district court records are held separately, and a search of one will never return a case from the other.

Which court has a case is fixed by law, not by choice. Under Va. Code § 17.1-513, the circuit courts have original jurisdiction of all felony indictments, presentments and informations; original and general jurisdiction of civil cases except claims for personal property or money worth $100 or less; and appellate jurisdiction in all cases, civil and criminal, in which an appeal may be taken from a lower tribunal. Everything else in the traffic and misdemeanor world — the summons an officer writes at the roadside — begins in the general district court.

	General district court	Circuit court
Typical cases	Traffic infractions, misdemeanors, small civil claims	Felonies, civil claims over $100, appeals from district court
Where a traffic ticket starts	Yes	No
Jury	No	Yes, where available
Court of record	No	Yes
Where to search	District court case search	Circuit court case search

How to search Virginia circuit court case information

The search itself is short. Gathering what it needs is the part people skip.

1. Work out the locality. Circuit court records are organised by court — the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond, the Circuit Court of Fairfax County, and so on. A case is in the court for the county or city where the charge was brought or the suit was filed, not where anyone lives.
2. Have the name exactly as the court has it. Court indexes use the name on the charging document. Middle initials, hyphenated surnames and suffixes matter, and a nickname will not match.
3. Have the case number if you can. It is the fastest search and the only one that avoids matching the wrong person. Where the number is printed on a Virginia summons or order is a page of its own.
4. Choose criminal or civil. Circuit court searches separate the two. A felony charge and a debt collection suit against the same person are in different indexes.
5. Read the coverage note on the court’s page. Not every circuit court has the same records online, and the earliest year available differs from court to court. The judiciary’s own site is the only reliable statement of what a given court publishes, and it changes.

A case search and a court calendar are not the same document. The search returns the record of one case; a court docket is the court’s list of the cases set for a particular day, and it is read differently.

If the name search returns several people, do not assume the first one is the right one. Nothing on the results screen proves identity, and the Commonwealth’s system deliberately limits what identifying detail it displays.

What circuit court case information shows, and what it leaves out

A circuit court case record typically gives the charge or the cause of action, the case number, the filing date, the hearing dates the court has set, and — once the case is over — the disposition. What the terms on that screen mean is worth reading before drawing conclusions from them; the page on Virginia court case status and information walks through them.

What it does not give is the file. The online record is an index of a case, not a copy of it. Motions, orders, transcripts, exhibits, plea agreements and sentencing orders are in the paper or imaged file held by the clerk, and none of them appear online. A reader who needs to know why a judge ruled as they did cannot get that from a case search.

It also does not include everything. Records sealed by court order, cases involving juveniles, and material the Code makes confidential are excluded, and a charge that has been expunged is removed from the police and court records altogether — which is why a charge a person remembers may no longer be findable at all. That process, and the narrow circumstances in which it is available, are set out on the page about expunging a record in Virginia.

Why a circuit court case does not come up

In rough order of how often it happens:

• It is a district court case. Traffic and misdemeanor matters are in the general district court system. See Virginia traffic court case information for how a summons appears there.
• Wrong court. A case filed in the next county over will not appear in the one being searched.
• The name does not match the index. Try the surname alone, or a shorter spelling.
• It is too new. Court staff enter cases as the paperwork reaches them; a case filed the same week may not be visible yet.
• It is too old. Each court’s online records start at a different year; older files exist in the clerk’s office but not on the screen.
• It is not public. Sealed, expunged and confidential matters do not appear, and no error message says so.

When the search has failed for any of these reasons, the answer is the clerk’s office, not another website.

When a traffic case turns up in the circuit court

There is one route by which an ordinary traffic case ends up in circuit court case information, and drivers are often surprised to find it there. Under § 17.1-513, when an appeal of a district court conviction is noted, jurisdiction over the charge vests in the circuit court. The appeal is not a review of what the district court judge did; the circuit court tries the case again from the beginning, which is why the district court proceeding leaves no transcript to argue about.

The practical consequence for a search is that the same charge can produce two records: one in the general district court system showing a conviction, and a second in the circuit court system showing the appeal. Neither is wrong. They are two stages of one case, and the circuit court’s judgment is the one that counts. A reader who finds only the first and stops has the wrong outcome.

How to get the actual case file from the clerk

Court files are public records with their own statute, and it is not the Freedom of Information Act. For a circuit court, Va. Code § 17.1-208 provides that records maintained by the clerks of the circuit courts are open to inspection in the clerk’s office by any person, and that the clerk shall furnish copies when asked, subject to a reasonable fee charged under Va. Code § 17.1-275. That fee schedule sets $0.50 for each page of a copy of a paper, record or electronic record that is not otherwise specifically provided for. For a district court file, the parallel provision is Va. Code § 16.1-69.54:1.

What matters for a circuit court file in particular is that the request has an address: it goes to the clerk of the courthouse that heard the case, never to Richmond and never to the judiciary’s central office, because that is where the physical or imaged file sits. Bring the case number, the style of the case and the year; a circuit court clerk indexes by case, and a request phrased as a question about a person will come back asking for one. Expect to put it in writing, to be asked for costs before the copying starts rather than after, and to wait — the outer limit written into both sections is a month, and busy urban clerks use most of it. The full procedure both sections set out, including what a clerk may and may not charge and what a clerk is never obliged to produce, is laid out on the page about how to ask a Virginia office for a record.

A clerk’s office will answer a specific, polite request quickly. It will not do research, answer legal questions or tell a person what to do about a charge. For that, a Virginia attorney who practices in that courthouse is the right person to ask, and for a criminal or traffic charge that is worth doing before the hearing rather than after.

Why this site holds no Virginia case data

There is a reason the pages here explain a search instead of running one. Subsection D of § 17.1-208 and subsection C of § 16.1-69.54:1 both provide that reports of aggregated, non-confidential case data viewable through the Commonwealth’s online case information systems shall not be sold or posted on any other website or in any way redistributed to any third party. The Executive Secretary may refuse a request to enforce that.

So the case data on this site is exactly none of it. Everything here points at the courts’ own system, which is also the only copy that is current. The commercial “Virginia court records” sites that do publish case data are working from snapshots: a charge dismissed last month can still be showing as pending on one of them a year later, and there is no correction process because there is no relationship with the court.

For a wider view of which Virginia body holds which record, see the pages on Virginia public records and on court cases in Virginia.