Montgomery County Court Records Lookup

The following is for information purposes only

Montgomery County, also known as Montco, is part of the southeast Pennsylvania region. It was created on September 10, 1784, and its county seat is Norristown. Montgomery County is the third most populous county in Pennsylvania with a population of 856,399 residents. The Court of Common Pleas and the Magisterial District Courts provide legal and technical support in all judicial processes that are located within the county.

The Court of Common Pleas is located in Norristown and has five different divisions. It consists of the Civil, Criminal, Family, Juvenile, and Orphan Divisions. The Court of Common Pleas is also responsible for overseeing the cases involving major civil, criminal, family, domestic, juvenile delinquency, juvenile dependency, and probate trials. 24 judges are serving the Court of Common Pleas. There are thirty Magisterial District Courts in Montgomery County spreading across various locations. Some of the Magisterial District Courts are in Limerick, Norristown, Harleysville, Blue Bell, Lafayette Hill, Collegeville, and Jenkintown. They preside over criminal preliminary arraignments, landlord/tenant cases, preliminary hearings, traffic offenses, municipal ordinance violations, and civil claims where the amount in dispute does not exceed $12,000.

According to the 2022 court caseload statistics for Montgomery County, there were a total of 620 new cases filed in the juvenile division of the courts of common pleas in 2022, for formal case dispositions, there were 212 total adjudicated delinquent cases terminated. The total informal dispositions on record was 134. Annually, the Court of Common Pleas juvenile division processes approximately 900 cases, however, the number of juvenile cases filed from 2016 till now keeps dropping. This means that Montgomery County is experiencing a decrease in the number of crimes committed by minors on a yearly basis. The Clerk of Courts (COC)/Prothonotary is the custodian of records for all cases in the county and also provides certification of official court records. The Clerk maintains a computerized index and docket of original cases, court records can be viewed at the office of the clerk of courts or on the Unified Judicial System of Pennsylvania Web Portal. The public should be aware that domestic relations bench warrants and probate court records are confidential in Montgomery County.

All legal matters are executed in the Court of Common Pleas and Magisterial District Courts. These courts have well-defined purposes, each division and location have different functions and provide a solid foundation for established legal principles for the court system in the county.