# Court decisions

> Decisions of Slovak courts in which a company is a party, including the court, case number, form of decision and a link to the document.

The Slovak Ministry of Justice publishes the decisions of every Slovak court – close to 4.7 million documents. The register has no party index: names and company IDs live in the body of the decision rather than in fields of their own. We therefore search for a company ID in the decision text and keep only those decisions where the number is genuinely given as a party identifier.

## What the register contains
- The issuing court and the case number
- Form of decision – judgment, resolution, payment order
- Date the decision was issued
- The company role in the proceedings – claimant, respondent or undetermined
- A link to the full text on the Ministry of Justice portal

## Fields we return

| Field | Meaning |
| --- | --- |
| `court` | The court that issued the decision. |
| `case_number` | Case number of the proceedings. |
| `decision_type` | Form of decision as recorded by the register. |
| `decision_date` | Date the decision was issued. |
| `role` | The company role in the proceedings – plaintiff, defendant or other. |
| `ruling` | Outcome of the proceedings. The register does not publish it, so it is always unknown. |
| `pdf_url` | Link to the full text of the decision. |
| `summary` | The passage of the decision text in which the company is named. |

## How to request the data

```http
GET /v1/company/ico/35821655?scope=court_decisions

{
  "court_decisions": [
    {
      "court": "Okresný súd Bratislava II",
      "case_number": "57Er/726/2008",
      "decision_type": "Uznesenie",
      "decision_date": "2012-08-20",
      "role": "defendant",
      "ruling": "unknown"
    }
  ]
}
```

## How often we update

A batch of companies whose data is older than 30 days is refreshed daily. The register has no party index, so every company costs its own search – there is no bulk import to run.

## What it is used for

How often a company appears as respondent usually says more than what any single decision contains. A run of enforcement proceedings brought by health insurers describes payment behaviour better than one judgment ever will.

The role is read out of the decision text, not out of a database field. Where the passage does not settle it we return other, because guessing would mean labelling a claimant a respondent.

## Frequently asked questions

### Why is ruling always unknown?

Because the register does not publish the outcome as data. Inferring it from the text would be a guess that looks like a fact once it is in an API response, so we do not return it at all.

### Do you have every decision involving the company?

We have the ones that carry the company ID in the text. A decision that names a party only by name cannot be attributed – and we do not attribute it by name-matching either.

### The company has thousands of decisions. Do I get them all?

Large creditors appear in tens of thousands of enforcement proceedings. We store the 200 most recent decisions and report the total number of matches separately, so it is clear you are looking at a selection.