15 ms·

A Sad Irony: The Federal Judiciary's PACER Pricing Is Illegal

250 points by thinkcomp 14y ago

monochromatic 14y ago
It is by no means clear from reading this what the meaning of "necessary" is in context. Maybe it means "necessary to cover costs," but I can't tell from this post.
- thinkcomp 14y ago
  See Senator Lieberman's 2010 letter to Senate Appropriators for clarification (which I've updated my essay to reference): "As you know, Court documents are electronically disseminated through the PACER system, which charges $.08-a-page for access. While charging for access was previously required, Section 205(e) of the E-Government Act changed a provision of the Judicial Appropriation Act of 2002 (28 U.S.C. 1913 note) so that courts “may, only to the extent necessary” (instead of “shall”) charge fees “for access to information available through automatic data processing equipment.” The Committee report stated: “[t]he Committee intends to encourage the Judicial Conference to move from a fee structure in which electronic docketing systems are supported primarily by user fees to a fee structure in which this information is freely available to the greatest extent possible… Pursuant to existing law, users of PACER are charged fees that are higher than the marginal cost of disseminating the information.” Since the passage of the E-Government Act, the vision of having information “freely available to the greatest extent possible” is far from being met, despite the technological innovations that should have led to reduced costs in the past eight years. In fact, cost for these documents has gone up, from $.07 to $.08-per-page. The Judiciary has attempted to mitigate the shortcomings of the current fee approach in a variety of ways, including limiting charges to $2.40-per-document and the recent announcement that any charges less than $10-per-quarter will be waived. While these efforts should be commended, I continue to have concerns that these steps will not dramatically increase public access as long as the pay-per-access model continues."
  - pseingatl 14y ago
    Keep in mind that the US court system is not funded through filing fees. Courts generally have struggled with funding. Minimum mandatory penalties and the drug wars caused Miami to end up with four downtown federal courthouses and a (relatively) new federal prison. These facilities were not inexpensive. To get back to the principal issue, the Government gets free access to PACER (and even free photocopies at the courthouse) whereas a private defendant, like Swartz, has to pay for these out of his own pocket. The government gets a case agent, the defendant gets none. The defendant may get a public defender, but only after he has exhausted his funds--and this happens.
btilly 14y ago
Note, the PACER incident is not the direct reason why Aaron was in the legal trouble he was in, that was his downloading of JSTOR's material, which under the law clearly illegal. However there is widespread speculation that the PACER incident was behind why prosecutors may have wanted to throw the book at Aaron.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  Presumably it was the incident that left a bruise in the govt's eye and they never forgot it. But that is speculation, we don't know of course (even as tax payers who bankroll this crap) what goes into decision and who decides how and to what level of fervor cases get prosecuted.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- mikehotel 14y ago
  What do those speculators say about the former Chief Technologist at the US FTC [1] leading the team behind RECAP [2]? 1. http://techventures.columbia.edu/news/professor-bellovin-named-ftc-s-chief-technologist http://techventures.columbia.edu/news/professor-bellovin-nam... 2. https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/ https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/
  - mikehotel 14y ago
    It appears the Administrative Office deemed RECAP ok, while at the same time prohibiting "fee exempt PACER users" from sharing content [1]. That is a fine line. 1. http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html
- kamkazemoose 14y ago
  Just a note, but it's possible what Aaron did actually was legal. There was an article [1] by an expert witness in the case posted earlier today. So I think the trial would have been revealing. Admittedly the article doesn't prove anything, but I think everyone has so far been assuming Aaron's guilt. And while there is no denying the acts that he committed, they may have been legal. 1. http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is-the-evidence http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is...
xxpor 14y ago
>Not surprisingly for government IT projects, PACER looks like most web sites did around 1994. It's actually not one web site at all, but more like one hundred, spread across different court districts and circuits in the country. The district-level courts each have their own custom version because judges demand custom features, and no one can refuse their demands. The appellate-level courts have an entirely different and separate infrastructure, written in a different language. (Technically-inclined readers, it's a Java applet. But really twelve different Java applets, depending on the circuit. No joke.) The Supreme Court, which can do whatever it wants, opts out of PACER entirely. Each level of PACER has separate login requirements, not to mention that PACER is separate from CM/ECF, an unbelievably badly-named system that actually lets you file documents, but under a separate login. What this means is that it is essentially impossible to follow a case from court to court, and if you even try, it is very, very expensive. What. The. Fuck.
- icelancer 14y ago
  Really makes you want to hand over important technology-based decisions to the government and court systems, no?
  - lostlogin 14y ago
    I worked for a company that made scale models of the Eurofighter for (I think) British aerospace. We made full scale models of those pylon held fuel tanks. Made them to the specs given to us and they didn't fit when they arrived at some kind of arms fair. Much scrambling later the problem was found. We made the tanks correctly, but the actual plane had some kind of old standard built into it by accident.
- rprasad 14y ago
  PACER was designed in the early 1990s, before the internet was popular, i.e., when AOL was the internet for most of America. Indeed, PACER is probably as old, if not older than, most HN users. It has not been upgraded since then, largely because Congress has not provided sufficient funds to the courts for them to do so (appropriations in the past two decades have largely been reserved for operations or for courtroom construction, but not technological upgrades. Much of the money from PACER access fees goes toward meeting the shortful in the operation budget, because Congress in its infinite wisdom has underfunded the federal courts for most of the last two decades. (It's wierd that I have spent most of the last two days defending the American court system...)
lostlogin 14y ago
The article cites PlainSite as a cost reference. That surely can't be the cost of a developer, server, bandwidth etc? Free labour? Anyone know more? I know that an enerprising hacker can do a lot, but setting up a system better than another that has a $25 million budget? And would anyone care to guess what it should cost per page (ideally with some sort of cost justification)? 1c? .01c?
- jcromartie 14y ago
  It should cost $0 per page. The infrastructure and maintenance for a document database of our country's tax-funded court proceedings should be so vanishingly small in relation to what we already spend on the justice system that it should approach 0.
cloudwalking 14y ago
I agree with this essay, but I want to point one thing out. > Any startup could design a system better than this > for $10,000. (For a frame of reference, PlainSite, > which is roughly as complex as PACER, has cost Think > about $1,000 so far. This is shortsighted. I think hosting a government website is quite complex. They have very strict security requirements and maintenance requirements, with very little economy of scale. $25M does seem a bit high, but I can easily see their costs above $1M.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  I doubt that $10,000 is anywhere close to the cost of designing the system. $10,000 is not even enough to hire one senior developer for a month. And the designers would have to have domain knowledge of the legal system, which very few web developers have; you'd probably need to hire lawyers as consultants. Plus, the article mentions that different courts and judges have differing requirements, so just figuring out what the system needs to do seems non-trivial. Also, even if the system could be designed for $10,000, the yearly cost of operating it (hardware costs and personnel) would be significant, since all the data from the various courts would need to be entered daily, and someone would need to verify that the data in the system was complete and accurate. Plus, the system would need to be backed up and have redundancy and disaster recovery plans. You can't afford to shut down the legal system across the entire country because one data center loses power. We're not talking about Twitter here; we're talking about critical national infrastructure.
  - davedx 14y ago
    I'm a senior developer and I cost about that, at freelance rates. I could definitely design and build the things you mention in a month, providing the core functionality (a document storage system) is not overly complex. And who said anything about the yearly cost of operating it?
    - eru 14y ago
      (Slightly off-topic.) > I'm a senior developer and I cost about that, at freelance rates. For a month? Do you live in a place with really low cost of living?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- thinkcomp 14y ago
  The E-Government Act of 2002 amended the notes, not the statute itself, as the essay describes.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    - thinkcomp 14y ago
      I'm happy to make corrections, but I'm not sure of your source of information. Aside from PlainSite, both the GPO (official) and Cornell's LII (unofficial) show that the note still stands: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2008-title28/html/USCODE-2008-title28-partV-chap123-sec1913.htm http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2008-title28/html/USCODE... http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1913 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1913
mikehotel 14y ago
I'm not sure why RECAP (https://www.recapthelaw.org/why-it-matters/ https://www.recapthelaw.org/why-it-matters/) is not mentioned more prominently in TFA. "What does RECAP do? RECAP is an extension (or “add on”) for the Firefox web browser that 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. RECAP also makes other enhancements to the PACER experience, including more user-friendly file names."
- roel_v 14y ago
  Well, to state the obvious, it's because recap is a system that is competition to the author's plainsite project. Petty squabbling much like the article itself.
  - thinkcomp 14y ago
    Actually, PlainSite depends upon RECAP, and I think it's a great product, which is why I mentioned the Princeton team. The essay was about PACER's pricing scheme, not about RECAP, but I fully encourage everyone to use it. http://www.recapthelaw.org http://www.recapthelaw.org Not only that, but I've pledged $5,000 to anyone who can extend RECAP to Chrome: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=83 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=83
    - roel_v 14y ago
      Fair enough, seems I rushed to a conclusion.
pseingatl 14y ago
According to one commentator, that's not the only error in the article; There are a couple of factual errors in this post: "When you further consider that in the course of prosecuting one's own court case, one must refer to many, many other cases because of the nature of legal precedent, legal research can suddenly cost thousands of dollars—and that's without even hiring an overpriced lawyer." Aaron misunderstands the nature of legal research. Legal research is done at the appellate level. In the course of prosecuting a case, legal research is necessary, but you won't be conducting legal research with PACER--it's not that kind of system. District court cases are not precedential with respect to other district court cases and it is rare that there is a usable opinion deciding the case. At the appellate level things are different, and there are both free and paywalled systems containing those precedents, such as Google Scholar (free) and Lexis/Nexis (paywall). Putting aside legal research, it is not impossible to follow a case from court to court. Upon filing a notice of appeal, a district court case will be given an appellate court number which can then be followed on the appellate court's version of PACER.
- thinkcomp 14y ago
  Hi, From what I've seen, research is done at all levels, though the higher the level, the more likely the citation. For example, district judges like to cite other district decisions in their same courts for routine boilerplate, such as the conditions when a 12(b)(6) motion is appropriate. I have conducted legal research with PACER multiple times in the course of handling litigation. One key time was when I had to look up ALA v. Pataki--a district decision--which has key implications in the FaceCash case because it deals with the right of states to regulate the internet. It never got to the appellate level, but it's the law of the land now. So I would disagree with your statement that "district court cases are not precedential," because they sometimes are. Many other times I wanted to see how particular motions were drafted in other cases (having never written them before), which is something that you can really only do if you have access to the PDFs of the motions themselves. Google Scholar does not contain district case dockets or documents at this time, though it is a great resource. LexisNexis is barely usable for novices, expensive, and simply not a realistic option for many people involved in litigation who aren't lawyers. Even though appellate courts obviously track cases with numbers, those cases are not directly linked from PACER such that you can follow a case backwards or forwards with one click. I've used these systems pretty extensively. I stand by what I wrote. Aaron
tlrobinson 14y ago
For once I find myself agreeing with Aaron Greenspan, except AaronSW's latest legal troubles were with JSTOR, not PACER. The article should have at least pointed that out.
- thinkcomp 14y ago
  Tom, A lot has been written by many people about JSTOR, so I wanted to focus on PACER and its pricing, but I do mention JSTOR here: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=82 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=82 Aaron
dbot 14y ago
Lawyers use PACER quite a bit, but it's not because they love it or make money from it (in fact, clients are increasingly rejecting "research" charges). It's just that PACER is often faster, easier, and more certain than using the firm's internal document management system. PACER is set up for litigation - DMSes, while they let you store anything, don't understand what the content is. Our startup is basically tackling that problem - and one of the side benefits will be dramatically reduced PACER bills. There is no reason firms should ever be looking up their own case documents on PACER, since they get them for free in the first place.
fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
FYI, Interesting bit from the PACER TOU: >"The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches with a one page charge for no matches. The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded. There is a maximum charge of $3.00 for electronic access to any single document." It is also interesting to note that pricing is decoupled from actual bandwidth usage, or any other metric that could be correlated directly with the cost of providing the service.: >1. We use a formula to determine the number of pages for an HTML formatted report. >2. Any information extracted from the CM/ECF database, such as the data used to create a docket sheet, is billed using a formula based on the number of bytes extracted (4320 Bytes equals one page). >3. For a PDF document, the actual number of pages are counted to determine the number of billable pages.

250 points by thinkcomp 14y ago

It is by no means clear from reading this what the meaning of "necessary" is in context. Maybe it means "necessary to cover costs," but I can't tell from this post.

thinkcomp 14y ago
See Senator Lieberman's 2010 letter to Senate Appropriators for clarification (which I've updated my essay to reference): "As you know, Court documents are electronically disseminated through the PACER system, which charges $.08-a-page for access. While charging for access was previously required, Section 205(e) of the E-Government Act changed a provision of the Judicial Appropriation Act of 2002 (28 U.S.C. 1913 note) so that courts “may, only to the extent necessary” (instead of “shall”) charge fees “for access to information available through automatic data processing equipment.” The Committee report stated: “[t]he Committee intends to encourage the Judicial Conference to move from a fee structure in which electronic docketing systems are supported primarily by user fees to a fee structure in which this information is freely available to the greatest extent possible… Pursuant to existing law, users of PACER are charged fees that are higher than the marginal cost of disseminating the information.” Since the passage of the E-Government Act, the vision of having information “freely available to the greatest extent possible” is far from being met, despite the technological innovations that should have led to reduced costs in the past eight years. In fact, cost for these documents has gone up, from $.07 to $.08-per-page. The Judiciary has attempted to mitigate the shortcomings of the current fee approach in a variety of ways, including limiting charges to $2.40-per-document and the recent announcement that any charges less than $10-per-quarter will be waived. While these efforts should be commended, I continue to have concerns that these steps will not dramatically increase public access as long as the pay-per-access model continues."
- pseingatl 14y ago
  Keep in mind that the US court system is not funded through filing fees. Courts generally have struggled with funding. Minimum mandatory penalties and the drug wars caused Miami to end up with four downtown federal courthouses and a (relatively) new federal prison. These facilities were not inexpensive. To get back to the principal issue, the Government gets free access to PACER (and even free photocopies at the courthouse) whereas a private defendant, like Swartz, has to pay for these out of his own pocket. The government gets a case agent, the defendant gets none. The defendant may get a public defender, but only after he has exhausted his funds--and this happens.

btilly 14y ago

Note, the PACER incident is not the direct reason why Aaron was in the legal trouble he was in, that was his downloading of JSTOR's material, which under the law clearly illegal. However there is widespread speculation that the PACER incident was behind why prosecutors may have wanted to throw the book at Aaron.

rdtsc 14y ago
Presumably it was the incident that left a bruise in the govt's eye and they never forgot it. But that is speculation, we don't know of course (even as tax payers who bankroll this crap) what goes into decision and who decides how and to what level of fervor cases get prosecuted.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
mikehotel 14y ago
What do those speculators say about the former Chief Technologist at the US FTC [1] leading the team behind RECAP [2]? 1. http://techventures.columbia.edu/news/professor-bellovin-named-ftc-s-chief-technologist http://techventures.columbia.edu/news/professor-bellovin-nam... 2. https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/ https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/
- mikehotel 14y ago
  It appears the Administrative Office deemed RECAP ok, while at the same time prohibiting "fee exempt PACER users" from sharing content [1]. That is a fine line. 1. http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html http://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/exemptnotice.html
kamkazemoose 14y ago
Just a note, but it's possible what Aaron did actually was legal. There was an article [1] by an expert witness in the case posted earlier today. So I think the trial would have been revealing. Admittedly the article doesn't prove anything, but I think everyone has so far been assuming Aaron's guilt. And while there is no denying the acts that he committed, they may have been legal. 1. http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is-the-evidence http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is...

xxpor 14y ago

>Not surprisingly for government IT projects, PACER looks like most web sites did around 1994. It's actually not one web site at all, but more like one hundred, spread across different court districts and circuits in the country. The district-level courts each have their own custom version because judges demand custom features, and no one can refuse their demands. The appellate-level courts have an entirely different and separate infrastructure, written in a different language. (Technically-inclined readers, it's a Java applet. But really twelve different Java applets, depending on the circuit. No joke.) The Supreme Court, which can do whatever it wants, opts out of PACER entirely. Each level of PACER has separate login requirements, not to mention that PACER is separate from CM/ECF, an unbelievably badly-named system that actually lets you file documents, but under a separate login. What this means is that it is essentially impossible to follow a case from court to court, and if you even try, it is very, very expensive. What. The. Fuck.

icelancer 14y ago
Really makes you want to hand over important technology-based decisions to the government and court systems, no?
- lostlogin 14y ago
  I worked for a company that made scale models of the Eurofighter for (I think) British aerospace. We made full scale models of those pylon held fuel tanks. Made them to the specs given to us and they didn't fit when they arrived at some kind of arms fair. Much scrambling later the problem was found. We made the tanks correctly, but the actual plane had some kind of old standard built into it by accident.
rprasad 14y ago
PACER was designed in the early 1990s, before the internet was popular, i.e., when AOL was the internet for most of America. Indeed, PACER is probably as old, if not older than, most HN users. It has not been upgraded since then, largely because Congress has not provided sufficient funds to the courts for them to do so (appropriations in the past two decades have largely been reserved for operations or for courtroom construction, but not technological upgrades. Much of the money from PACER access fees goes toward meeting the shortful in the operation budget, because Congress in its infinite wisdom has underfunded the federal courts for most of the last two decades. (It's wierd that I have spent most of the last two days defending the American court system...)

lostlogin 14y ago

The article cites PlainSite as a cost reference. That surely can't be the cost of a developer, server, bandwidth etc? Free labour? Anyone know more? I know that an enerprising hacker can do a lot, but setting up a system better than another that has a $25 million budget? And would anyone care to guess what it should cost per page (ideally with some sort of cost justification)? 1c? .01c?

jcromartie 14y ago
It should cost $0 per page. The infrastructure and maintenance for a document database of our country's tax-funded court proceedings should be so vanishingly small in relation to what we already spend on the justice system that it should approach 0.

cloudwalking 14y ago

I agree with this essay, but I want to point one thing out. > Any startup could design a system better than this > for $10,000. (For a frame of reference, PlainSite, > which is roughly as complex as PACER, has cost Think > about $1,000 so far. This is shortsighted. I think hosting a government website is quite complex. They have very strict security requirements and maintenance requirements, with very little economy of scale. $25M does seem a bit high, but I can easily see their costs above $1M.

greenyoda 14y ago
I doubt that $10,000 is anywhere close to the cost of designing the system. $10,000 is not even enough to hire one senior developer for a month. And the designers would have to have domain knowledge of the legal system, which very few web developers have; you'd probably need to hire lawyers as consultants. Plus, the article mentions that different courts and judges have differing requirements, so just figuring out what the system needs to do seems non-trivial. Also, even if the system could be designed for $10,000, the yearly cost of operating it (hardware costs and personnel) would be significant, since all the data from the various courts would need to be entered daily, and someone would need to verify that the data in the system was complete and accurate. Plus, the system would need to be backed up and have redundancy and disaster recovery plans. You can't afford to shut down the legal system across the entire country because one data center loses power. We're not talking about Twitter here; we're talking about critical national infrastructure.
- davedx 14y ago
  I'm a senior developer and I cost about that, at freelance rates. I could definitely design and build the things you mention in a month, providing the core functionality (a document storage system) is not overly complex. And who said anything about the yearly cost of operating it?
  - eru 14y ago
    (Slightly off-topic.) > I'm a senior developer and I cost about that, at freelance rates. For a month? Do you live in a place with really low cost of living?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

thinkcomp 14y ago
The E-Government Act of 2002 amended the notes, not the statute itself, as the essay describes.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - thinkcomp 14y ago
    I'm happy to make corrections, but I'm not sure of your source of information. Aside from PlainSite, both the GPO (official) and Cornell's LII (unofficial) show that the note still stands: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2008-title28/html/USCODE-2008-title28-partV-chap123-sec1913.htm http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2008-title28/html/USCODE... http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1913 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1913

mikehotel 14y ago

I'm not sure why RECAP (https://www.recapthelaw.org/why-it-matters/ https://www.recapthelaw.org/why-it-matters/) is not mentioned more prominently in TFA. "What does RECAP do? RECAP is an extension (or “add on”) for the Firefox web browser that 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. RECAP also makes other enhancements to the PACER experience, including more user-friendly file names."

roel_v 14y ago
Well, to state the obvious, it's because recap is a system that is competition to the author's plainsite project. Petty squabbling much like the article itself.
- thinkcomp 14y ago
  Actually, PlainSite depends upon RECAP, and I think it's a great product, which is why I mentioned the Princeton team. The essay was about PACER's pricing scheme, not about RECAP, but I fully encourage everyone to use it. http://www.recapthelaw.org http://www.recapthelaw.org Not only that, but I've pledged $5,000 to anyone who can extend RECAP to Chrome: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=83 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=83
  - roel_v 14y ago
    Fair enough, seems I rushed to a conclusion.

pseingatl 14y ago

According to one commentator, that's not the only error in the article; There are a couple of factual errors in this post: "When you further consider that in the course of prosecuting one's own court case, one must refer to many, many other cases because of the nature of legal precedent, legal research can suddenly cost thousands of dollars—and that's without even hiring an overpriced lawyer." Aaron misunderstands the nature of legal research. Legal research is done at the appellate level. In the course of prosecuting a case, legal research is necessary, but you won't be conducting legal research with PACER--it's not that kind of system. District court cases are not precedential with respect to other district court cases and it is rare that there is a usable opinion deciding the case. At the appellate level things are different, and there are both free and paywalled systems containing those precedents, such as Google Scholar (free) and Lexis/Nexis (paywall). Putting aside legal research, it is not impossible to follow a case from court to court. Upon filing a notice of appeal, a district court case will be given an appellate court number which can then be followed on the appellate court's version of PACER.

thinkcomp 14y ago
Hi, From what I've seen, research is done at all levels, though the higher the level, the more likely the citation. For example, district judges like to cite other district decisions in their same courts for routine boilerplate, such as the conditions when a 12(b)(6) motion is appropriate. I have conducted legal research with PACER multiple times in the course of handling litigation. One key time was when I had to look up ALA v. Pataki--a district decision--which has key implications in the FaceCash case because it deals with the right of states to regulate the internet. It never got to the appellate level, but it's the law of the land now. So I would disagree with your statement that "district court cases are not precedential," because they sometimes are. Many other times I wanted to see how particular motions were drafted in other cases (having never written them before), which is something that you can really only do if you have access to the PDFs of the motions themselves. Google Scholar does not contain district case dockets or documents at this time, though it is a great resource. LexisNexis is barely usable for novices, expensive, and simply not a realistic option for many people involved in litigation who aren't lawyers. Even though appellate courts obviously track cases with numbers, those cases are not directly linked from PACER such that you can follow a case backwards or forwards with one click. I've used these systems pretty extensively. I stand by what I wrote. Aaron

tlrobinson 14y ago

For once I find myself agreeing with Aaron Greenspan, except AaronSW's latest legal troubles were with JSTOR, not PACER. The article should have at least pointed that out.

thinkcomp 14y ago
Tom, A lot has been written by many people about JSTOR, so I wanted to focus on PACER and its pricing, but I do mention JSTOR here: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=82 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=82 Aaron

dbot 14y ago

Lawyers use PACER quite a bit, but it's not because they love it or make money from it (in fact, clients are increasingly rejecting "research" charges). It's just that PACER is often faster, easier, and more certain than using the firm's internal document management system. PACER is set up for litigation - DMSes, while they let you store anything, don't understand what the content is. Our startup is basically tackling that problem - and one of the side benefits will be dramatically reduced PACER bills. There is no reason firms should ever be looking up their own case documents on PACER, since they get them for free in the first place.

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago

FYI, Interesting bit from the PACER TOU: >"The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches with a one page charge for no matches. The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded. There is a maximum charge of $3.00 for electronic access to any single document." It is also interesting to note that pricing is decoupled from actual bandwidth usage, or any other metric that could be correlated directly with the cost of providing the service.: >1. We use a formula to determine the number of pages for an HTML formatted report. >2. Any information extracted from the CM/ECF database, such as the data used to create a docket sheet, is billed using a formula based on the number of bytes extracted (4320 Bytes equals one page). >3. For a PDF document, the actual number of pages are counted to determine the number of billable pages.