4 ms·

Thanks for posting this! I'm the executive director of Free Law Project. If anybody has any questions or comments, I'm happy to chat!

techntoke 7y ago
What are some of the more interesting legal documents that you've come accross? I've seen a lot of interesting ones from Steven Biss, where he also sued YouTube in the David Seaman lawsuit. He is the attorney representing Nunes against Twitter for someone having a parody account about him. He is currently representing a guy named Robert Steele in a lawsuit against Jason Goodman that has a lot of very unique and interesting documents regarding cyberwarfare, dirty bomb hoaxes, informants being involved, etc.
- mlissner 7y ago
  Everything out of the Mueller report, frankly. It's history-making stuff. https://free.law/featured-cases/special-counsel/ https://free.law/featured-cases/special-counsel/
ikeboy 7y ago
I use the recap extension. Usually an uploaded PDF or docket is immediately available on courtlistener, but every so often there's a period of time where nothing gets updated; this happened briefly yesterday, for example. Is this some kind of maintenance? I tend to browse Pacer side by side with courtlistener, e.g. get the docket, read through docket on courtlistener, then click through to buy the documents I want. When there's a delay like that I'm never quite sure if it was actually uploaded successfully so I go save the documents separately, it's inconvenient. Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer? What I've noticed is that it'll show the docket entry if I have the extension installed, but it's an abbreviated form (e.g. "motion to dismiss" instead of a longer entry with party info, attachments, etc).
- mlissner 7y ago
  Yeah, we had some outage yesterday. Docker seems to be opening files and then not closing them again, which causes issues sooner or later. Sorry about that. The one redeeming thing with this is when this happens we're usually still getting your uploads, just not processing them. Anyway, sorry. > Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer? Yeah, we've experimented with that, but haven't gotten it nailed down yet. If somebody wanted to help, especially somebody with free-look access, we'd love to hear from you.
ikeboy 7y ago
Also, there are some jurisdictions that appear to block the recap extension; at least I've noticed I can't load PDFs but incognito works, and turning on the extension in incognito makes it fail again. Where would be the best place to report this?
- mlissner 7y ago
  Send me an email: mike@free.law. We can take a look. I don't know of any jurisdictions that have that issue, but it could be an emerging pattern or one we've missed.
mCOLlSVIxp6c 7y ago
Have you considered allowing people to "donate" their PACER accounts up to the free limit so that CourtListener could download documents directly without relying on a RECAP or API user to do it? With enough free accounts you might be able to start downloading every document in every case.
- mlissner 7y ago
  We're thinking about that, actually! There are a couple hard parts though: 1. How do you know which documents to buy with the donated credits? 2. How do you get access to the user's account? Do you store their password somewhere? Maybe a simple trick would be to throw a little alert with the extension around the end of the quarter just to say, "Hey, it's the end of the quarter. Have you spent your entire free budget?" Hm. There's an opportunity here, but we've never quite nailed it down.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    1. Whatever docs your org feels have the highest value at that time. 2. The user provides their creds and you store them in Hashicorp Vault, AWS Param Store, or another secrets manager, and then retrieve them for use in making requests with a queue and runner mechanism. If you have questions about this, email in profile. Last job was somewhere making requests for users with their creds at scale, currently in infosec. I would love to help make all PACER docs freely available.
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    I would say the easiest thing is make a web page that downloads documents from highly-viewed dockets, prioritizing opinions and other interesting entries using the API. The UI is something that just prompts for username/password/budget and then shows a list of the fetched documents. Then if it's popular you can do more interesting things like prompting people to use the web page from the extension, moving the whole web page and fetch logic into the extension so it doesn't leak credentials, turning it into a cryptocurrency so people can fetch documents on demand, etc., but first things first.
CobrastanJorji 7y ago
Question for you: what other efforts are out there to improve free access to the documents trapped in PACER?

techntoke 7y ago

What are some of the more interesting legal documents that you've come accross? I've seen a lot of interesting ones from Steven Biss, where he also sued YouTube in the David Seaman lawsuit. He is the attorney representing Nunes against Twitter for someone having a parody account about him. He is currently representing a guy named Robert Steele in a lawsuit against Jason Goodman that has a lot of very unique and interesting documents regarding cyberwarfare, dirty bomb hoaxes, informants being involved, etc.

mlissner 7y ago
Everything out of the Mueller report, frankly. It's history-making stuff. https://free.law/featured-cases/special-counsel/ https://free.law/featured-cases/special-counsel/

ikeboy 7y ago

I use the recap extension. Usually an uploaded PDF or docket is immediately available on courtlistener, but every so often there's a period of time where nothing gets updated; this happened briefly yesterday, for example. Is this some kind of maintenance? I tend to browse Pacer side by side with courtlistener, e.g. get the docket, read through docket on courtlistener, then click through to buy the documents I want. When there's a delay like that I'm never quite sure if it was actually uploaded successfully so I go save the documents separately, it's inconvenient. Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer? What I've noticed is that it'll show the docket entry if I have the extension installed, but it's an abbreviated form (e.g. "motion to dismiss" instead of a longer entry with party info, attachments, etc).

mlissner 7y ago
Yeah, we had some outage yesterday. Docker seems to be opening files and then not closing them again, which causes issues sooner or later. Sorry about that. The one redeeming thing with this is when this happens we're usually still getting your uploads, just not processing them. Anyway, sorry. > Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer? Yeah, we've experimented with that, but haven't gotten it nailed down yet. If somebody wanted to help, especially somebody with free-look access, we'd love to hear from you.

ikeboy 7y ago

Also, there are some jurisdictions that appear to block the recap extension; at least I've noticed I can't load PDFs but incognito works, and turning on the extension in incognito makes it fail again. Where would be the best place to report this?

mlissner 7y ago
Send me an email: mike@free.law. We can take a look. I don't know of any jurisdictions that have that issue, but it could be an emerging pattern or one we've missed.

mCOLlSVIxp6c 7y ago

Have you considered allowing people to "donate" their PACER accounts up to the free limit so that CourtListener could download documents directly without relying on a RECAP or API user to do it? With enough free accounts you might be able to start downloading every document in every case.

mlissner 7y ago
We're thinking about that, actually! There are a couple hard parts though: 1. How do you know which documents to buy with the donated credits? 2. How do you get access to the user's account? Do you store their password somewhere? Maybe a simple trick would be to throw a little alert with the extension around the end of the quarter just to say, "Hey, it's the end of the quarter. Have you spent your entire free budget?" Hm. There's an opportunity here, but we've never quite nailed it down.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  1. Whatever docs your org feels have the highest value at that time. 2. The user provides their creds and you store them in Hashicorp Vault, AWS Param Store, or another secrets manager, and then retrieve them for use in making requests with a queue and runner mechanism. If you have questions about this, email in profile. Last job was somewhere making requests for users with their creds at scale, currently in infosec. I would love to help make all PACER docs freely available.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  I would say the easiest thing is make a web page that downloads documents from highly-viewed dockets, prioritizing opinions and other interesting entries using the API. The UI is something that just prompts for username/password/budget and then shows a list of the fetched documents. Then if it's popular you can do more interesting things like prompting people to use the web page from the extension, moving the whole web page and fetch logic into the extension so it doesn't leak credentials, turning it into a cryptocurrency so people can fetch documents on demand, etc., but first things first.

CobrastanJorji 7y ago

Question for you: what other efforts are out there to improve free access to the documents trapped in PACER?