Today’s posting is the third of a four-part series on PACER provided by G. Thomas Sandbach, Esq, owner of Justice Technology Consulting. Tom’s contact information appears at the end of the post.

Carl Malamud’s “Thumb Drive Corps” managed to liberate about 20% of PACER’s documents before the limited free access pilot program was “suspended”. The cessation of that pilot did not terminate the efforts to allow free access to all federal court documents. New efforts have emerged to tap the PACER database and provide greater access.

Free Court Dockets

An interesting, but somewhat limited approach to providing free federal court case information is Free Court Dockets. A product developed by Courtport.com and supported by advertising and donations , this service provides access to docket entries from “all federal district civil, criminal, and bankruptcy courts, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, Federal Court of Claims, and the Court of International Trade.”

The site uses its own PACER account to retrieve the docket entries (PACER’s own access to these entries is free to registered users) and provides them to requesters free of charge. Although no PACER account is required, requesters must know the exact court and case/docket number in order to access the docket through the site. The actual documents are not available through this site unless the requestor has their own PACER account.

RECAP

A second approach is directed toward making PACER documents available for free. RECAP (“turning PACER around”) is a free extension for the Firefox browser developed by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. According to its developers, it improves the PACER experience while helping PACER users build a free and open repository of public court records. RECAP users automatically donate the documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive. And RECAP saves users money by alerting them when a document they are searching for is already available from this repository.

PACER account holders who are using the RECAP equipped Firefox browser may elect to upload any documents that they access to the repository, allowing future users to access that same document without paying the PACER fee.

Despite initial court warnings about RECAP use (e.g. the New Mexico Bankruptcy Court) the Administrative Office of the United States Courts now  apparently has “no problem with counsel using RECAP.

In an effort to reassure users and the courts, the developers assert that RECAP is not functional when an attorney is using a court Electronic Case Filing (ECF) account. According to them, the RECAP repository cannot be accessed by search engines. At this time free access to documents still requires a PACER account, but there is no charge for viewing or downloading documents that have been uploaded to RECAP.

These “solutions” have brought PACER a step closer to free public access. The pace of innovation assures us that there will be others. The question is, will they be a step forward or not?

Next: Free PACER? – The Implications

G. Thomas Sandbach, Esq.
tom.sandbach@justicetech.org
www.justicetech.org
Phone - 302-824-0760
Member: Delaware State Bar Association
Affiliate: IJIS Institute
Member: National Criminal Justice Association

Photo Credit = Pacer

NOTE: The views expressed in this posting are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the position of Justice Served.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Court Management, Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.