Guide
The Judiciary's case file lookup: how to read an IUE
What the IUE is and how it is written, how a case file of the Judiciary of Uruguay is looked up, what it means for a case file to be kept under seal, why the office in the number is usually not the court hearing the case, and what the judicial recess is.
Open the official IUE lookupLook up your case nowWhat the Judiciary publishes, and where
The Judiciary of Uruguay publishes its case file lookup at expedientes.poderjudicial.gub.uy. It is public, free and asks for no registration: you enter a single piece of data, the IUE, and you get the case title, its status and the list of filings with their date and kind.
The same information is offered over web services, and the body's own manual says what they are for: it built them because automated systems were already querying, and it reserves the web form for whoever looks up one case at a time. It is a distinction worth keeping in mind if you ever plan to automate the lookup of a whole caseload.
The portal's front page states that case file information is updated to the last business day. That is not small print: what you see today is yesterday's close, and any tool promising real time over this channel is promising something the channel does not give.
How to read an IUE
The IUE, the case file's unique identifier, has three parts and two separators that admit no variation.
SSSS-NNNNNN/AAAA
The office
The first digits identify the office that received the matter. In Montevideo it is almost always the receiving and distributing office, which hands matters out among the courts; the court that later hears the case appears somewhere else, not in the number.
The registration number
The sequential number that office assigned to the matter within the year. It is the part most often mistyped when dictated over the phone, and the part most worth copying and pasting.
The year
Four digits, the year the matter was registered. It is not the year of the rulings issued later: a file registered in 2015 can carry rulings from 2025, and those rulings are numbered with their own year.
The separators
A hyphen between office and number, a slash between number and year, and no space in between. One extra space, or a hyphen where the slash belongs, returns exactly the same answer as a case file that does not exist, so the mistake does not look like a mistake.
Leading zeros change nothing: an office written as 2, as 002 or as 0002 is the same office, and the same goes for the registration number. What does change is one digit too many inside the number, because at that point it is no longer padding but a different value. And a detail that surprises whoever automates: the portal does not return the normalized number, it returns the very one it was sent, so that field is no use as an identifier in a database of your own.
Five steps to look up a case file
The order matters, the third one above all: reading the status before the case title saves the most common confusion of this lookup.
Open the public lookup
The address is expedientes.poderjudicial.gub.uy. No account, no password and no professional credential: the lookup is open to anyone.
Type the full IUE
Office, hyphen, registration number, slash and year, with no spaces. The form accepts that single field: there is no box for a party's name, none for an identity document and none for a company name, so without the number there is no lookup.
Read the status before anything else
The status is the field that tells you what kind of answer arrived: that there is case file data, that the case file is not in the system, or that it is kept under seal. A sealed file answers with the status and nothing else, no case title and not a single filing, and whoever looks only at the list of filings will mistake it for a file with no activity.
Walk the filings
Each filing carries its date, its kind, the court that issued it and, where applicable, the ruling's number. Only some carry it, and that is normal: in a file with dozens of filings most come without a number, because not every filing is a ruling with a text.
Ask for the text of the ruling
With the ruling's number and the IUE you ask for the text, which is where what the court ordered actually is. When the system has no text to give it answers with a sealed-ruling notice, and it is worth knowing that it uses the same notice for three different cases: a genuinely sealed ruling, a number that does not exist and a case file that does not exist. The notice does not tell you which of the three it is.
Look up your case here
Custodio asks the court portal for you, so it can take a few seconds. We ask you for no name, no email and no account: what the lookup leaves behind is a single record, deleted two hours later. How we handle this lookup
The Uruguayan lookup runs one business day behind and does not cover criminal matters.
This video is narrated in Spanish only; the transcript below is in English.
Read the video transcript
This guide explains how to look up a case file at the Judiciary of Uruguay. First, the site asks about cookies: choose what you prefer.
Inside the guide there is a search box. Type the case number in the format the country uses; here we use a sample case file.
Custodio checks that a person is making the lookup before it goes out to ask. It does not ask for an email or a password, and it does not keep the number you typed.
Look it up. Custodio asks the court portal on your behalf, so it can take a few seconds.
This is what the portal publishes today: the court, the parties and the latest action with its date. The parties appear as initials, because nobody has identified themselves here yet.
At the bottom it says how far this country's lookup reaches. Read it before drawing conclusions: the Uruguayan lookup runs one business day behind and does not cover criminal matters.
Looking once is looking once. With a free account you can put that case file under watch: Custodio checks the portal every day for you and alerts you when a new action appears.
What the lookup returns
Six pieces of data, and none of them is an interpretation: they are the fields the system itself publishes.
- The case title: who is claiming against whom, and what kind of proceeding it is.
- The status of the case file, which is the field that governs all the others.
- The origin, that is, the office that received the matter and registered it.
- The list of filings, oldest first, with the date and the kind of each one.
- The court that issued each filing, which is the one actually hearing the matter.
- The text of the ruling, for the filings that carry its number.
Paste your IUE and we'll flag every new move
We watch the Judiciary of Uruguay for you: an alert the moment there is a new movement, no more checking by hand. With each one, the AI updates the matter status and proposes the deadline that runs; it drafts the reply when you ask.
Create your free accountWhat the official lookup does not do
Saying it saves half an hour of looking for something that is not there, and explains why tools exist that work on top of this channel.
- There is no search by party. The only input is the IUE, so whoever loses the number has no way to reach the case file from here.
- It is not real time. Case file information is updated to the last business day, and the portal says so itself.
- It does not reach criminal matters. The adversarial criminal process is followed through the hearing lookup, which is another system of the same Judiciary and has its own entrance.
- Not all of the archive is online. An old case file may not appear, and the answer is the same as for a mistyped number: check the number before concluding that the matter does not exist.
- The Judiciary publishes no terms of use for the case file lookup or for its web services. They were searched for on 11 September 2026, through the portal's own links, through the site's search and in the manual of the services, and they do not exist.
None of this is fixed by checking more often: they are properties of the channel, not failures of whoever looks a file up.
Frequently asked questions
Does looking up a case file cost anything?
No. The lookup is public and free, and it asks for no registration and no identification of any kind.
Do you have to be a lawyer to look one up?
No. Anyone with the IUE can look the case file up. The exception is a sealed case file: nobody sees that one through this channel.
Is the office in the number the court hearing the case?
Almost never in Montevideo. The first digits identify the office that received the matter, not the court hearing it; that one appears in each filing, and it can change over the course of the proceeding.
What does a sealed case file mean?
That the Judiciary does not publish its content. The lookup answers with that status and with no other data, and it is not a portal error or a connection problem: it is the correct answer for that case file.
Can I look it up from here?
Yes. There is a search box on this page: paste the IUE and we look the case up in the Judiciary's portal, with the answer on screen in seconds, with no account and no cost. You get the court, the latest filing with its date and the case title with the parties' names reduced to initials; the full case file is read in the official lookup this guide links to, or inside your account. The lookup runs one business day behind and does not cover criminal matters. And if you want to be told the day the file moves, you create a free account from the result.
Looking it up is the first step, not the work
Custodio checks your case files every day and puts artificial intelligence on what it finds: case status, deadline, draft and answers about your documents.