Trellis is a legal analytics platform focused primarily on state court records. While many court record databases lean heavily on federal data from PACER, Trellis has carved out a niche by indexing state-level cases that are often harder to find elsewhere. That focus is exactly what makes Trellis a problem for people whose state court records are showing up in Google. If you have been involved in a state court proceeding and Trellis has a page with your name on it, that page can rank prominently in search results.
What Trellis Does Differently
Trellis.law collects data from state trial courts across the United States. Their platform is built for attorneys and legal researchers who want to analyze judicial behavior, case outcomes, and litigation trends. But the public-facing pages they create are indexed by Google, and that is where the problem starts for everyday people.
Because Trellis focuses on state courts, it often surfaces records that other platforms miss. Family court cases, civil disputes, landlord-tenant matters, and local criminal cases that never made it into the federal system can all appear here. This means you might clear your name from CourtListener and Justia and still find a Trellis page showing up in search results.
How to Request Removal from Trellis
Step one: visit Trellis.law and search for your name. Identify all pages that reference you and save the full URLs.
Step two: go to Trellis's removal request page. This is the official channel for requesting that your records be taken down or de-indexed from their platform.
Step three: send a clear, written request that includes the specific URLs you want removed, your full legal name, and an explanation of why the listing is causing harm. If you have documentation showing that the case was dismissed, sealed, or expunged, include that. Court orders carry significant weight with Trellis.
Step four: allow two to three weeks for a response. Trellis is a smaller operation than some of the other legal data companies, and response times can vary. If you do not hear back, follow up with a second request that references your original submission.
Step five: once Trellis confirms removal or de-indexing, check Google search results over the following weeks. If the cached page persists, use Google Search Console or Google's URL removal tool to request that the cached version be cleared.
When the Request Does Not Work
If Trellis declines your request, you have options. Providing a court order for expungement or sealing is the strongest lever you have. Without one, you may need to work with an attorney to draft a formal legal demand. In parallel, you can submit a Google removal request for the specific Trellis URL and pursue suppression strategies that push the page off the first page of search results.
Do Not Stop at Trellis
State court records that appear on Trellis often appear on other platforms as well. Popular scraping sites include CourtListener, Justia, UniCourt, PacerMonitor, DocketBird, and Casemine. You need to address all of them. Our complete court record removal guide explains the full workflow so you can tackle everything systematically.
If you have tried these steps and are still stuck, or if you just do not have the time, we can help. Book a consultation or book court record removal services and we will take it from here.
Related Resources
- Complete Court Record Removal Guide
- Remove from CourtListener
- Remove from Justia
- Court Record Removal Services
The Broader Context: Why State Court Records Create Lasting Online Harm
Trellis isn't an anomaly. It reflects a wider pattern in how public records migrate online and persist long after the underlying proceedings have ended. According to a 2019 Pew Research survey on Americans and privacy, 79 percent of U.S. adults reported being very or somewhat concerned about how companies use their data, yet most feel they have little practical ability to control what's out there. A Trellis listing is a concrete example of that gap: the platform's legal right to publish the record and your ability to do anything about it are not equal.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's work on privacy has long documented how aggregation makes individual data points far more damaging than they appear in isolation. A single state court record might seem minor. Pair it with your employer, city, and professional profile in search results, and the harm compounds quickly. That aggregation problem is precisely what makes platforms like Trellis different from a courthouse clerk's physical filing cabinet. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse consumer guides offer practical framing for people working through exactly this situation, including how to document harm when making formal removal requests.
For anyone whose records involve a federal dimension, the PACER system is the authoritative source for federal case data, and understanding the distinction between what lives there versus what Trellis indexes at the state level matters when you're prioritizing which platforms to address first. Research published through the Brennan Center for Justice has consistently shown that records of arrests without convictions, and of cases that were later dismissed, create measurable employment and housing barriers when they surface in online searches. That research reinforces why getting a Trellis page down isn't just cosmetic: it has real downstream consequences.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A Portland-based licensed electrician came to us after a 2019 civil dispute with a former business partner turned into a Trellis listing that ranked third in Google for his full name. The case had been settled and dismissed with prejudice in 2020, but Trellis still showed the original filing. His contractor license renewal was flagged during a background check review, and two prospective clients mentioned finding the page. We submitted a removal request with a copy of the dismissal order attached. Trellis de-indexed the page within 18 days, and we followed up with a Google cache removal request. The page was gone from the first three pages of results within five weeks.
An early-stage SaaS founder in Austin had a landlord-tenant case from 2017 showing up on Trellis whenever investors searched her name during a seed round. The case had been ruled in her favor, but the Trellis listing showed only the filing, not the outcome. Her initial DIY removal request got no response after 30 days. We resubmitted with a structured legal demand letter referencing the final judgment, and Trellis responded within 10 days. We then ran a suppression campaign to move three owned profiles above where the cached result had appeared, giving her cleaner search results before her funding close date.
By the Numbers: What the Research Says About Court Records Online
The scale of the problem is larger than most people realize. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that state courts disposed of roughly 47 million cases in a single recent year. Even a small fraction of those cases indexed by platforms like Trellis represents tens of thousands of individual people whose names appear in public-facing search results they never consented to. State-level cases. landlord-tenant disputes, civil claims, and misdemeanor proceedings make up the bulk of that volume. These are exactly the case types Trellis specializes in collecting.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has tracked the growth of court record aggregation platforms for over a decade, flagging how public-record doctrine. designed for in-person courthouse access. was never intended to enable the kind of automated, searchable, globally indexed databases that exist today. That legal gap means there's no federal statute that forces Trellis or platforms like it to honor a removal request. Your leverage comes from court orders, expungement statutes, and platform-level goodwill. not from a clear statutory right. Knowing that going in helps you set realistic expectations and prepare stronger documentation before you submit your first request.
The Brennan Center for Justice published research in 2022 finding that people with online court records face measurable barriers to employment and housing, even when the underlying case resulted in no conviction. Employers who run informal name searches before a formal background check encounter Trellis pages before they ever see a resume. That's not a hypothetical. It's the sequence that plays out when someone's civil dispute or dismissed charge lives at position three or four on a Google results page. The Brennan Center's data reinforces why timeline matters: every week a Trellis page stays indexed is a week it can influence a decision someone is making about you right now.
These numbers aren't meant to be discouraging. They're meant to explain why a systematic approach beats a one-time request. Trellis removal is step one. Clearing cached pages, auditing parallel platforms, and building positive search presence that displaces remaining results is the full picture. The data shows the problem is structural, which means the response has to be structured too.
Another Client Situation
A general contractor based in Albuquerque, New Mexico reached out in early 2024 after losing two commercial bids in a single quarter. When he searched his own name, a Trellis page for a 2019 civil dispute with a former subcontractor appeared second in Google results, directly below his company website. The case had been settled with no finding against him, but the Trellis listing showed only the filing details and the plaintiff's complaint. none of the resolution. He had submitted one removal request to Trellis six months earlier and received no response. We submitted a second request with the settlement documentation attached, referenced the original submission date, and escalated through Trellis's support contact rather than the standard form. Trellis de-indexed the page within 19 days. We then used Google's URL removal tool to clear the cached version and published two project case-study pages on his website to occupy the search real estate the Trellis listing had been holding. Within eight weeks of the de-indexing, those case-study pages and his Google Business Profile occupied the top four results for his name. He closed a contract the following month with a client who told him directly that his online presence looked professional and clean.
By the Numbers: The Real Scale of State Court Record Exposure
State courts handle an enormous volume of cases that most people never expect to find online years later. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that state courts process roughly 100 million cases annually across the United States, a figure that dwarfs federal court filings by orders of magnitude. Because Trellis has specifically built its index around state trial courts, its potential data footprint is far larger than platforms that focus on federal PACER records. That volume means the odds that your name appears somewhere in their index are meaningfully higher than most people assume when they first start investigating their online presence.
The harm that flows from that exposure is not theoretical. The Brennan Center for Justice published research in 2021 finding that nearly 70 million Americans have some type of arrest or conviction record, and that a significant share of those records involve charges that were ultimately dismissed or reduced. Those dismissed and sealed cases don't always disappear from third-party legal analytics platforms the way they do from official court indexes. Trellis, like other aggregators, may retain the record on its platform even after a court has ordered it sealed, because the company often argues that it captured the data while the record was still technically public. That's the window that creates lasting search visibility problems for people who believed their case was resolved. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse consumer guides on court records specifically flag this pattern, noting that third-party aggregators are under no uniform federal obligation to update or delete records when underlying court files are expunged or sealed, which is why direct removal requests to the platform itself remain a necessary first step.
For people who work in licensed professions, finance, healthcare, or education, the professional consequences of a visible Trellis listing compound quickly. Background screening firms routinely pull data from legal analytics platforms as supplementary sources, and a page that ranks on the first page of a Google search for your name will almost certainly be seen by a hiring manager or client doing basic due diligence. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has documented how the commercial trade in court record data creates a secondary market where information originally compiled for legal research purposes gets repurposed in ways that directly affect employment and housing decisions, often without the subject's knowledge. Taking action on your Trellis listing isn't a minor housekeeping task. For a meaningful share of the people who contact us, it's the single highest-priority item in their entire online reputation situation.
Another Client Situation
A licensed occupational therapist in Albuquerque, New Mexico came to us in early 2024 after a prospective employer flagged a Trellis page that had ranked second in Google search results for her full name for over 14 months. The page referenced a civil landlord-tenant dispute from 2021 that had been resolved in her favor and formally dismissed by the court. Because the dismissal happened after Trellis had indexed the original case filing, the platform's page still showed the case as an open matter with no disposition noted. She had submitted one removal request on her own approximately six months earlier and received no reply. We submitted a documented follow-up request that included the court's dismissal order, a written explanation of the professional licensing context, and a specific citation to the incorrect case status displayed on the page. Trellis responded within 11 days and confirmed de-indexing. We then filed a Google cached-content removal for the URL. Within 28 days of the Trellis confirmation, the page had dropped entirely from Google's first three pages of results for her name, and she reported no further issues raised during her next two hiring cycles.