18 ms·

Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says

334 points by elliekelly 6y ago

gnicholas 6y ago
Just to clarify for non-lawyers, PACER is needed for certain filings, but not the four opinions themselves. There are several good websites that host these. Not that PACER isn’t overcharging, just that it isn’t where lawyers go to get opinions, which are critically important for the practice of law.
- mlissner 6y ago
  I'm chiming in a lot, but this is only sort of true. In theory, yes, opinions and orders are free on PACER. In practice clerks have to check a box when they upload each opinion to mark it as free, and yeah....some clerks do a great job. Others do terribly. Some info here: https://free.law/pacer-facts/#written-opinions-are-free-on-pacer-but-h https://free.law/pacer-facts/#written-opinions-are-free-on-p...
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    In my practice, all important opinions were published and freely available. Perhaps there are areas of law where coverage is spotty or delayed, but I literally never needed to use PACER because I didn't work on active litigation (just transactions, opinion letters, client memos and other research-related work).
    - mlissner 6y ago
      Right, you can usually find opinions, but in many cases, that's because the provider you're using — WestLaw, Bloomberg, Justia, Google Scholar, whatever — paid for it on your behalf. They (we) have to go to PACER and buy these things too.
      - pnw_hazor 6y ago
        These are free https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/19 https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/19 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscourts/district/alsd/2017/%7B%22pageSize%22%3A%22100%22%2C%22offset%22%3A%220%22%7D https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscourts/district/als...
ilamont 6y ago
It's amazing how long this has taken. I had to use PACER in the late 00s, and it wasn't just the fees that were bad, it was the whole stinking system, from billing to UI. It wouldn't surprise me if it was designed by the same contractor that built TESS for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (another fed website sorely in need of an overhaul).
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  There have been mitigation efforts such as RECAP [1] (and Court Listener [2]), where documents are shuffled off to the Internet Archive when you're using PACER with a browser extension installed, but this is welcome news as this data should be freely available considering the costs involved. Tremendous win for open data advocacy, but there is still work to be done. > Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions of pages that were originally scanned PDFs. Everything that is in the RECAP Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily. Finally, we make the RECAP Archive available via an API or as bulk data for journalists, researchers, startups, and developers. My hope is that one day everything in PACER has been retrieved out for storage in the Internet Archive, and the ongoing costs for keeping the collection up to date are trivial. The user fee waiver per quarter has been raised to $30; please consider using RECAP if you're a PACER user! [1] https://free.law/recap/ https://free.law/recap/ [2] https://www.courtlistener.com/ https://www.courtlistener.com/
  - wahern 6y ago
    > this data should be freely available considering the costs involved The purpose of the fees is to cover the costs incurred by the court system in managing the document system so that it's self-funding rather than being paid out of the government's general revenue. In other words, while the costs required for publishing any particular document are miniscule, the point is to provide revenue for the court system. I'm not defending it, but that's the reason the costs are so high and why the system still exists. To get rid of the PACER fees you need to convince Republican congressmen to "subsidize" the court system.
mmhsieh 6y ago
for anyone who has ever gotten the surprise O($10,000) PACER monthly bill, this is a no-brainer. not just lawyers who get these bills btw.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  But it also blocks access to justice. Just pulling the docket and a few related small filings for a case can cost $50+. It (and this is a stretch) essentially disenfranchises poorer members of society by limiting their access to justice and information.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    In my experience, lawyer fees are highly decoupled from their expenses... which is to say even if PACER fees were dramatically reduced, lawyer fees will not. Not sure how that can help poorer members of society, since most people are quite unlikely to be doing their own case law research anyway.
    - chaps 6y ago
      Heh. One way it helps poorer members of society is by making it possible to do basic research on courts data so that the public can understand and take action from understanding what's happening in courts and how law is applied. This research is impossible right now without spending billions of dollars in PACER fees.
      - pnw_hazor 6y ago
        Most opinions and orders are published for free on various government sites. PACER is useful for seeing submissions from parties or the court that occur in pending cases. Usually this stuff is of little interest or use to normal people.
        chaps 6y ago
        Heh. I'm not talking about opinions, I'm talking about case outcomes, involved parties, lawyers, judge info, terminated parties, dates, docket info, context, complaints. And furthermore, I'm not talking about individual cases. The interest for "normal" people largely comes from the aggregate of PACER records, with analysis done on top of that. In other words - because we can't get aggregate records of court information, we can't run analysis that would be interesting or useful for understanding what's happening. Surely you can see how this data could inform the US in understanding how the law is applied throughout. If not, I'll gladly type up a list of 50 kinds of analysis that would be interesting to normal people. The people who would run this analysis are technical journalists with backgrounds in court data. An example of a project that uses PACER information whose bills are in the thousands because of the high PACER costs: https://www.chicagoreporter.com/series/settling-for-misconduct/ https://www.chicagoreporter.com/series/settling-for-miscondu... This is not feasible in a time where freelance journalists have to do preliminary research before even writing a pitch.
1024core 6y ago
It's a travesty that we have to pay for this information at all!
- varenc 6y ago
  75% Of usets don’t pay. The first $N dollars are free.
  - readme 6y ago
    have you used it? I signed up just to see if I could pull dockets on publically traded companies, so I'd know if there'd be litigation before others and get an edge in trading. It was about 2 hours of using the system before I realized this would be impossible (you know, on my personal budget.) I think I made like under 10 searches and racked up over a dollar in fees. Some of the pages actually charge you per search result not even search. So if you query a term and you get 100 results, that's 100 charges.
    - varenc 6y ago
      Yes! I used it a bunch and it was free. Had a friend that was prosecuted by the feds. It was a long/complex case and I pulled up all the documents for it, multiple times. I ended up not being charged a thing! Though the pricing was very opaque. I assumed I would be charged something so was surprised a bit when it was all free. (though they should have made this much more clear) I feel like using PACER data to inform stock trading signals is a pretty niche use case... For "regular people" that have a connection with a few cases, I think it should be free, and it was in my experience.
- site-packages1 6y ago
  I agree that they're public records, but you even have to pay reasonable fees for FOIA requests, which are also public records. There is some cost in maintaining and distributing the records. While it's true that the government could pay for it as a public service, and I believe they should, PACER is self-funded via these fees for now. In that regard, it's actually quite a good system, unreliant on annual budgets by Congress, but instead funded via the users at a pro rata rate for how much use a user gets out of it. Notably, the information is free up to a certain threshold.
schoolornot 6y ago
If the fees were reasonable, fine. But I remember getting charged "8 cents" a page for search results, even for queries that yielded no results. The "No Results Found" page... 8 cents.
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  Haha that's terrible. When was this?
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    It's now.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  You won't actually get charged if your search volume and page views are low. It is still dumb that basic functionality is nickel and dimed like it's some sort of 70's timeshare.
- mlissner 6y ago
  It gets even worse than that. Many pages are charged by the number of results or the length of the page generated. But you don't know the price until you load it and see how long the page is. Most have a cap of $3, but some don't, so when you press that button to load the next page, sometimes it just costs $100 and you really had no way to know it'd happen until it did. PACER is terrible.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    There's even a warning that you should make sure to make your query as specific as possible, because if you screw up and it returns 100 pages, sucks to be you. There's basically 0 chance this would be legal if you're a private company.
    - thephyber 6y ago
      > There's basically 0 chance this would be legal if you're a private company. In the USA it would absolutely be legal and you would be bound by a binding arbitration clause and a non-disclosure + non-disparagement clause. You might even be bound by a license / ToS which prevents you from comparing the capabilities of that system against a better system[1]. [1] https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-why-you-rarely-see-database-benchmarks/ https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...
blintz 6y ago
Recap (https://free.law/recap/ https://free.law/recap/) is a really cool piece of civic tech to work around PACER’s absurd fees. Fantastic news that we could someday be rid of them.
- zucker42 6y ago
  Unfortunately we could never be free of PACER just through RECAP because of new documents.
  - joecool1029 6y ago
    Anyone can help though without incurring a financial penalty. Install recap extension, make a PACER account, and request new documents. Extension automatically uploads what you request and it'll show up on courtlistener free for all. Keep it under $30/quarter and PACER waives the fees.
    - voisin 6y ago
      Is there a way to automate this to get Recap and PACER to converge on coverage?
      - akvadrako 6y ago
        It wouldn’t be hard technically but who will pay for it?
        Firerouge 6y ago
        Nobody, if you keep it under $30 per quarter per contributing user
        xxpor 6y ago
        It almost strikes me as sort of like a torrent or something like Folding@Home. If everyone signed up to the service and provided their credentials (lets ignore the obvious security issues here), when someone requested a document via RECAP it could use the accounts that have signed up. It would use each account until it got near the $30 threshold and then move on to the next one.
pseingatl 6y ago
Federal criminal defense attorneys must pay for PACER access out of their own pockets (in theory, they are reimbursed, often years later, often at less than the full cost). Nor can they access records in criminal cases in other districts. Meanwhile, prosecutors don’t pay and have nationwide access. It’s fair of course. Completely. The Rule of law™.
- mlissner 6y ago
  Hi, founder of Free Law Project here. Actually, the DOJ is the biggest PACER user and they pay a ton of money on PACER each year. Somebody FOIA'ed it a few years back, and it totals about $3-4M/year. https://free.law/pacer-facts/#what-if-i%E2%80%99m-a-government-employee-say-at https://free.law/pacer-facts/#what-if-i%E2%80%99m-a-governme...
  - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
    There is a difference between defense attorneys having to pay out of pocket (and being reimbursed a few years later) and the DOJ paying the bill for their prosecutors.
    - mlissner 6y ago
      Yes, very true, thanks. Another interesting angle is how DOJ can subpoena tech co's for, say, location information, but defense attorneys can't. So if you want exculpatory data, you have fewer avenues for getting it. The deck is stacked in a lot of ways against the defense.
      - jhart99 6y ago
        What prevents defense attorney's from accessing that data? Would it be possible for a defendant to download his own location history and use it?
        ta2987 6y ago
        > can subpoena
ajb 6y ago
Here's my pacer story: When the Microsoft antitrust case was on, I made a pacer account to follow it; and kept using it during the SCO vs linux debacle. It was a bit worrying to look at things which cost $0.10/page, but I knew that if I didn't actually go over $10 (or something), I wouldn't get charged. I never did go over the chargeable amount, but nevertheless for a few years I used to get an invoice for $0.00 - sent by airmail to the UK. Given they never bothered to fix that bug, I guess they were raking it in.
- LorenPechtel 6y ago
  Never fixed? I had to look some stuff up on PACER many years ago, never went over the free threshold, never got a bill of any sort.
  - ajb 6y ago
    Well, maybe they did fix it; they closed my account a while back for lack of use.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dependenttypes 6y ago
The creator of CSS was sued (and ended up losing, unfairly imo but it drew the attention of the lawmakers at the end) for making an open database of court records. https://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/06-11-blog.html https://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/06-11-blog.html (it has links to the next posts) I wish that every country published their court documents for free.
Shicholas 6y ago
Gupta Wessler is an incredibly awesome firm. I recommend everyone interested in the intersection of technology and law to follow this firm and their motions.
tptacek 6y ago
I don't have an opinion about whether PACER's fees are too high or not, or whether metered pricing is the right plan, but our court systems are generally underfunded, severely, and that problem causes far more justice equity problems than PACER fees do.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  There is no differentiating - PACER fees are a justice equity problem. It is impossible to separate one from the other. Inmates and pro se litigants need the information on PACER, too. The Courts have previously allowed these fees on the ridiculous theory that the same information was available in hard copy at the court house. It’s not equal access to justice when someone can afford to get information in two clicks and someone else needs to take a bus an hour each way.
droidno9 6y ago
The entire Federal Judiciary runs on a budget of about $8-$8.5 billion/year.[1] Think about that for a moment. One of the three co-equal branches of the US Government, and guardian of the US Constitution, operates on a budget of less than 1% of the Department of Defense's budget ($1.15 trillion), 10% of the Department of Homeland Security's ($91.6 billion), and 20% of the Department of Justice's ($42.3 billion).[2] One of the reasons for PACER fees (and other court costs) is the Judiciary's attempt to have some financial autonomy from Congress, even though it clearly depends on Congress for almost all of its annual budget. As others have stated, you can get case law for free elsewhere. You do need to access PACER for docket material, however. But there's even a fee exemption for "indigents, pro bono attorneys, academic researchers, and non-profit organizations."[3] [1] https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/governance-judicial-conference/congressional-budget-request https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/governance-jud... [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/agency https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/agency [3] https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pricing-how-pacer-fees-work https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pricing-how-pacer-fees-work
- anonu 6y ago
  I'm not sure that comparison is really apples to apples. How much does it cost to run Congress? The presidency? That may be more apt a comparison than the budget of one of the departments
- GordonS 6y ago
  I really don't think a comparison to the DoD's exorbitant budget is useful, as pretty much anything will be tiny by comparison. Granted I don't know exactly what is within their remit, but $8B is a fuck-tonne of money.
  - adwi 6y ago
    ~ $25/citizen. Edit: For reference, the UK spends roughly $150 per capita. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098367/justice-spending-in-the-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098367/justice-spending...
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
They raised the fee waiver to $30 in January. They say only 25% of PACER users ever exceed that threshhold. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of who makes up the 25%. If there was a compelling public interest in serving those users in the 25% then, theoretically, the parties in each case could make their filings publicly available; the parties have access to free copies of the filings in their case. The reasons why parties would not want to do that -- which I trust the reader can imagine -- probably explains part of the historical reluctance to make unlimited PACER use free for everyone. As Amercians' privacy is decimated by tech companies, the moderate amount of "privacy" afforded to parties in federal courts might actually be something worth protecting. What is filed in federal courts is perhaps one area of people's lives that is not readily available for tech companies to vacumm up on a mass scale. Needless to say, filings routinely contain sensitive personal information. Note I am not making an argument either way, but just presenting some points to consider.
supernova87a 6y ago
How soon before someone opens a Scihub-like pirate site for all court documents? This feels a lot like scientific papers that are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and then yet again charged to taxpayers to access them.
- davidgerard 6y ago
  RECAP.
iav 6y ago
The fees are ridiculous. Google Scholar is free but it’s very difficult to use if you just want records for a particular case. In my attempt to solve the problem, I created the website bankrupt11.com which offers free access to federal bankruptcy records.
jaybna 6y ago
PACER fees are high, but at least federal records are centralized. Try searching for lawsuits at the local level. To my knowledge there is no online service at any cost that lets one hunt for civil actions. This is how the legal systems stays obfuscated for the average citizen.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
I would think that it would violate Due Process if PACER or any other public court record was needed for a case, but the person needing them could not afford them... On a related note, I would think that it would violate Due Process if any piece of information relevant to any case, legal or otherwise, were available and not provided, that is, if there was some sort of barrier (monetary, legal, or otherwise) preventing its easy and complete acquisition by the public, or whoever was involved in a case and needed it...

334 points by elliekelly 6y ago

Just to clarify for non-lawyers, PACER is needed for certain filings, but not the four opinions themselves. There are several good websites that host these. Not that PACER isn’t overcharging, just that it isn’t where lawyers go to get opinions, which are critically important for the practice of law.

mlissner 6y ago
I'm chiming in a lot, but this is only sort of true. In theory, yes, opinions and orders are free on PACER. In practice clerks have to check a box when they upload each opinion to mark it as free, and yeah....some clerks do a great job. Others do terribly. Some info here: https://free.law/pacer-facts/#written-opinions-are-free-on-pacer-but-h https://free.law/pacer-facts/#written-opinions-are-free-on-p...
- gnicholas 6y ago
  In my practice, all important opinions were published and freely available. Perhaps there are areas of law where coverage is spotty or delayed, but I literally never needed to use PACER because I didn't work on active litigation (just transactions, opinion letters, client memos and other research-related work).
  - mlissner 6y ago
    Right, you can usually find opinions, but in many cases, that's because the provider you're using — WestLaw, Bloomberg, Justia, Google Scholar, whatever — paid for it on your behalf. They (we) have to go to PACER and buy these things too.
    - pnw_hazor 6y ago
      These are free https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/19 https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/19 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscourts/district/alsd/2017/%7B%22pageSize%22%3A%22100%22%2C%22offset%22%3A%220%22%7D https://www.govinfo.gov/app/collection/uscourts/district/als...

ilamont 6y ago

It's amazing how long this has taken. I had to use PACER in the late 00s, and it wasn't just the fees that were bad, it was the whole stinking system, from billing to UI. It wouldn't surprise me if it was designed by the same contractor that built TESS for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (another fed website sorely in need of an overhaul).

toomuchtodo 6y ago
There have been mitigation efforts such as RECAP [1] (and Court Listener [2]), where documents are shuffled off to the Internet Archive when you're using PACER with a browser extension installed, but this is welcome news as this data should be freely available considering the costs involved. Tremendous win for open data advocacy, but there is still work to be done. > Thanks to our users and our data consulting projects, the RECAP Archive contains tens of millions of PACER documents, including every free opinion in PACER. Everything in the archive is fully searchable, including millions of pages that were originally scanned PDFs. Everything that is in the RECAP Archive is also regularly uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it has a lasting home. This amounts to thousands of liberated documents daily. Finally, we make the RECAP Archive available via an API or as bulk data for journalists, researchers, startups, and developers. My hope is that one day everything in PACER has been retrieved out for storage in the Internet Archive, and the ongoing costs for keeping the collection up to date are trivial. The user fee waiver per quarter has been raised to $30; please consider using RECAP if you're a PACER user! [1] https://free.law/recap/ https://free.law/recap/ [2] https://www.courtlistener.com/ https://www.courtlistener.com/
- wahern 6y ago
  > this data should be freely available considering the costs involved The purpose of the fees is to cover the costs incurred by the court system in managing the document system so that it's self-funding rather than being paid out of the government's general revenue. In other words, while the costs required for publishing any particular document are miniscule, the point is to provide revenue for the court system. I'm not defending it, but that's the reason the costs are so high and why the system still exists. To get rid of the PACER fees you need to convince Republican congressmen to "subsidize" the court system.

mmhsieh 6y ago

for anyone who has ever gotten the surprise O($10,000) PACER monthly bill, this is a no-brainer. not just lawyers who get these bills btw.

texasbigdata 6y ago
But it also blocks access to justice. Just pulling the docket and a few related small filings for a case can cost $50+. It (and this is a stretch) essentially disenfranchises poorer members of society by limiting their access to justice and information.
- Alupis 6y ago
  In my experience, lawyer fees are highly decoupled from their expenses... which is to say even if PACER fees were dramatically reduced, lawyer fees will not. Not sure how that can help poorer members of society, since most people are quite unlikely to be doing their own case law research anyway.
  - chaps 6y ago
    Heh. One way it helps poorer members of society is by making it possible to do basic research on courts data so that the public can understand and take action from understanding what's happening in courts and how law is applied. This research is impossible right now without spending billions of dollars in PACER fees.
    - pnw_hazor 6y ago
      Most opinions and orders are published for free on various government sites. PACER is useful for seeing submissions from parties or the court that occur in pending cases. Usually this stuff is of little interest or use to normal people.
      - chaps 6y ago
        Heh. I'm not talking about opinions, I'm talking about case outcomes, involved parties, lawyers, judge info, terminated parties, dates, docket info, context, complaints. And furthermore, I'm not talking about individual cases. The interest for "normal" people largely comes from the aggregate of PACER records, with analysis done on top of that. In other words - because we can't get aggregate records of court information, we can't run analysis that would be interesting or useful for understanding what's happening. Surely you can see how this data could inform the US in understanding how the law is applied throughout. If not, I'll gladly type up a list of 50 kinds of analysis that would be interesting to normal people. The people who would run this analysis are technical journalists with backgrounds in court data. An example of a project that uses PACER information whose bills are in the thousands because of the high PACER costs: https://www.chicagoreporter.com/series/settling-for-misconduct/ https://www.chicagoreporter.com/series/settling-for-miscondu... This is not feasible in a time where freelance journalists have to do preliminary research before even writing a pitch.

1024core 6y ago

It's a travesty that we have to pay for this information at all!

varenc 6y ago
75% Of usets don’t pay. The first $N dollars are free.
- readme 6y ago
  have you used it? I signed up just to see if I could pull dockets on publically traded companies, so I'd know if there'd be litigation before others and get an edge in trading. It was about 2 hours of using the system before I realized this would be impossible (you know, on my personal budget.) I think I made like under 10 searches and racked up over a dollar in fees. Some of the pages actually charge you per search result not even search. So if you query a term and you get 100 results, that's 100 charges.
  - varenc 6y ago
    Yes! I used it a bunch and it was free. Had a friend that was prosecuted by the feds. It was a long/complex case and I pulled up all the documents for it, multiple times. I ended up not being charged a thing! Though the pricing was very opaque. I assumed I would be charged something so was surprised a bit when it was all free. (though they should have made this much more clear) I feel like using PACER data to inform stock trading signals is a pretty niche use case... For "regular people" that have a connection with a few cases, I think it should be free, and it was in my experience.
site-packages1 6y ago
I agree that they're public records, but you even have to pay reasonable fees for FOIA requests, which are also public records. There is some cost in maintaining and distributing the records. While it's true that the government could pay for it as a public service, and I believe they should, PACER is self-funded via these fees for now. In that regard, it's actually quite a good system, unreliant on annual budgets by Congress, but instead funded via the users at a pro rata rate for how much use a user gets out of it. Notably, the information is free up to a certain threshold.

schoolornot 6y ago

If the fees were reasonable, fine. But I remember getting charged "8 cents" a page for search results, even for queries that yielded no results. The "No Results Found" page... 8 cents.

arthurcolle 6y ago
Haha that's terrible. When was this?
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  It's now.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
You won't actually get charged if your search volume and page views are low. It is still dumb that basic functionality is nickel and dimed like it's some sort of 70's timeshare.
mlissner 6y ago
It gets even worse than that. Many pages are charged by the number of results or the length of the page generated. But you don't know the price until you load it and see how long the page is. Most have a cap of $3, but some don't, so when you press that button to load the next page, sometimes it just costs $100 and you really had no way to know it'd happen until it did. PACER is terrible.
- xxpor 6y ago
  There's even a warning that you should make sure to make your query as specific as possible, because if you screw up and it returns 100 pages, sucks to be you. There's basically 0 chance this would be legal if you're a private company.
  - thephyber 6y ago
    > There's basically 0 chance this would be legal if you're a private company. In the USA it would absolutely be legal and you would be bound by a binding arbitration clause and a non-disclosure + non-disparagement clause. You might even be bound by a license / ToS which prevents you from comparing the capabilities of that system against a better system[1]. [1] https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-why-you-rarely-see-database-benchmarks/ https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...

blintz 6y ago

Recap (https://free.law/recap/ https://free.law/recap/) is a really cool piece of civic tech to work around PACER’s absurd fees. Fantastic news that we could someday be rid of them.

zucker42 6y ago
Unfortunately we could never be free of PACER just through RECAP because of new documents.
- joecool1029 6y ago
  Anyone can help though without incurring a financial penalty. Install recap extension, make a PACER account, and request new documents. Extension automatically uploads what you request and it'll show up on courtlistener free for all. Keep it under $30/quarter and PACER waives the fees.
  - voisin 6y ago
    Is there a way to automate this to get Recap and PACER to converge on coverage?
    - akvadrako 6y ago
      It wouldn’t be hard technically but who will pay for it?
      - Firerouge 6y ago
        Nobody, if you keep it under $30 per quarter per contributing user
        xxpor 6y ago
        It almost strikes me as sort of like a torrent or something like Folding@Home. If everyone signed up to the service and provided their credentials (lets ignore the obvious security issues here), when someone requested a document via RECAP it could use the accounts that have signed up. It would use each account until it got near the $30 threshold and then move on to the next one.

pseingatl 6y ago

Federal criminal defense attorneys must pay for PACER access out of their own pockets (in theory, they are reimbursed, often years later, often at less than the full cost). Nor can they access records in criminal cases in other districts. Meanwhile, prosecutors don’t pay and have nationwide access. It’s fair of course. Completely. The Rule of law™.

mlissner 6y ago
Hi, founder of Free Law Project here. Actually, the DOJ is the biggest PACER user and they pay a ton of money on PACER each year. Somebody FOIA'ed it a few years back, and it totals about $3-4M/year. https://free.law/pacer-facts/#what-if-i%E2%80%99m-a-government-employee-say-at https://free.law/pacer-facts/#what-if-i%E2%80%99m-a-governme...
- seanmcdirmid 6y ago
  There is a difference between defense attorneys having to pay out of pocket (and being reimbursed a few years later) and the DOJ paying the bill for their prosecutors.
  - mlissner 6y ago
    Yes, very true, thanks. Another interesting angle is how DOJ can subpoena tech co's for, say, location information, but defense attorneys can't. So if you want exculpatory data, you have fewer avenues for getting it. The deck is stacked in a lot of ways against the defense.
    - jhart99 6y ago
      What prevents defense attorney's from accessing that data? Would it be possible for a defendant to download his own location history and use it?
      - ta2987 6y ago
        > can subpoena

ajb 6y ago

Here's my pacer story: When the Microsoft antitrust case was on, I made a pacer account to follow it; and kept using it during the SCO vs linux debacle. It was a bit worrying to look at things which cost $0.10/page, but I knew that if I didn't actually go over $10 (or something), I wouldn't get charged. I never did go over the chargeable amount, but nevertheless for a few years I used to get an invoice for $0.00 - sent by airmail to the UK. Given they never bothered to fix that bug, I guess they were raking it in.

LorenPechtel 6y ago
Never fixed? I had to look some stuff up on PACER many years ago, never went over the free threshold, never got a bill of any sort.
- ajb 6y ago
  Well, maybe they did fix it; they closed my account a while back for lack of use.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dependenttypes 6y ago

The creator of CSS was sued (and ended up losing, unfairly imo but it drew the attention of the lawmakers at the end) for making an open database of court records. https://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/06-11-blog.html https://www.wiumlie.no/2018/rettspraksis/06-11-blog.html (it has links to the next posts) I wish that every country published their court documents for free.

Shicholas 6y ago

Gupta Wessler is an incredibly awesome firm. I recommend everyone interested in the intersection of technology and law to follow this firm and their motions.

tptacek 6y ago

I don't have an opinion about whether PACER's fees are too high or not, or whether metered pricing is the right plan, but our court systems are generally underfunded, severely, and that problem causes far more justice equity problems than PACER fees do.

elliekelly 6y ago
There is no differentiating - PACER fees are a justice equity problem. It is impossible to separate one from the other. Inmates and pro se litigants need the information on PACER, too. The Courts have previously allowed these fees on the ridiculous theory that the same information was available in hard copy at the court house. It’s not equal access to justice when someone can afford to get information in two clicks and someone else needs to take a bus an hour each way.

droidno9 6y ago

The entire Federal Judiciary runs on a budget of about $8-$8.5 billion/year.[1] Think about that for a moment. One of the three co-equal branches of the US Government, and guardian of the US Constitution, operates on a budget of less than 1% of the Department of Defense's budget ($1.15 trillion), 10% of the Department of Homeland Security's ($91.6 billion), and 20% of the Department of Justice's ($42.3 billion).[2] One of the reasons for PACER fees (and other court costs) is the Judiciary's attempt to have some financial autonomy from Congress, even though it clearly depends on Congress for almost all of its annual budget. As others have stated, you can get case law for free elsewhere. You do need to access PACER for docket material, however. But there's even a fee exemption for "indigents, pro bono attorneys, academic researchers, and non-profit organizations."[3] [1] https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/governance-judicial-conference/congressional-budget-request https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/governance-jud... [2] https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/agency https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/agency [3] https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pricing-how-pacer-fees-work https://pacer.uscourts.gov/pricing-how-pacer-fees-work

anonu 6y ago
I'm not sure that comparison is really apples to apples. How much does it cost to run Congress? The presidency? That may be more apt a comparison than the budget of one of the departments
GordonS 6y ago
I really don't think a comparison to the DoD's exorbitant budget is useful, as pretty much anything will be tiny by comparison. Granted I don't know exactly what is within their remit, but $8B is a fuck-tonne of money.
- adwi 6y ago
  ~ $25/citizen. Edit: For reference, the UK spends roughly $150 per capita. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098367/justice-spending-in-the-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098367/justice-spending...

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

They raised the fee waiver to $30 in January. They say only 25% of PACER users ever exceed that threshhold. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of who makes up the 25%. If there was a compelling public interest in serving those users in the 25% then, theoretically, the parties in each case could make their filings publicly available; the parties have access to free copies of the filings in their case. The reasons why parties would not want to do that -- which I trust the reader can imagine -- probably explains part of the historical reluctance to make unlimited PACER use free for everyone. As Amercians' privacy is decimated by tech companies, the moderate amount of "privacy" afforded to parties in federal courts might actually be something worth protecting. What is filed in federal courts is perhaps one area of people's lives that is not readily available for tech companies to vacumm up on a mass scale. Needless to say, filings routinely contain sensitive personal information. Note I am not making an argument either way, but just presenting some points to consider.

supernova87a 6y ago

How soon before someone opens a Scihub-like pirate site for all court documents? This feels a lot like scientific papers that are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and then yet again charged to taxpayers to access them.

davidgerard 6y ago
RECAP.

iav 6y ago

The fees are ridiculous. Google Scholar is free but it’s very difficult to use if you just want records for a particular case. In my attempt to solve the problem, I created the website bankrupt11.com which offers free access to federal bankruptcy records.

jaybna 6y ago

PACER fees are high, but at least federal records are centralized. Try searching for lawsuits at the local level. To my knowledge there is no online service at any cost that lets one hunt for civil actions. This is how the legal systems stays obfuscated for the average citizen.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

I would think that it would violate Due Process if PACER or any other public court record was needed for a case, but the person needing them could not afford them... On a related note, I would think that it would violate Due Process if any piece of information relevant to any case, legal or otherwise, were available and not provided, that is, if there was some sort of barrier (monetary, legal, or otherwise) preventing its easy and complete acquisition by the public, or whoever was involved in a case and needed it...