June 14, 2010 This week, RECAP team member Steve Schultze released new data on how PACER fees are collected and spent in a post entitled, “What Does It Cost to Provide Electronic Public Access to Court Records?” He will discuss this new data and other aspects of public access to federal case materials at a Law.gov event in DC tomorrow (live streaming...
Brian Carver August 26, 2014 If you only watch one video about using the federal Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, make it this video by Free Law Project’s Brian Carver: “Using PACER: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” The video provides a demonstration of what a regular member of the public might experience trying to find a copy...
Brian Carver September 16, 2014 Last Friday, it was reported by the Washington Post and Ars Technica that Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy, had sent a letter to Judge Bates, the head of the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO), urging the AO to put back online the recently-removed PACER documents from five courts. I had not seen the full...
Michael Lissner May 12, 2016 We at Free Law Project have been working towards our goals for a few years now, and as a result we’ve accumulated a bit of cruft. Today, we shed just a bit of it, as we simultaneously end one of our smaller projects and deprecate our list server. The project we are ending is our PACER Drainage project. The idea of the project was to...
Michael Lissner October 10, 2016 Recently, we started a new project to analyze a few million PACER documents that we acquired through the RECAP Project. As we began working with the data, one thing we did was count how many pages every document had so that we could calculate the average length of a PDF in PACER. Fairly quickly we learned that based on our sample, the...
Michael Lissner November 17, 2016 By now most readers of this blog know that PACER brings in a lot of money by selling public domain documents at a dime per page. What people might not realize is how these costs can add up for individual researchers or journalists. Looking through our database, we realized that we have quite a few really big cases. All of the cases...
Michael Lissner November 22, 2016 After months of development, we are thrilled to share a from-scratch re-launch of the RECAP Archive. Our new archive, available immediately at , contains all of the content currently in RECAP and makes it all fully searchable for the first time. At launch, the collection contains information about more than ten million PACER...
Started in 2010, Free Law Project is the leading non-profit using technology, data, and advocacy to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive. We host major open databases of opinions, federal filings, judges, financial disclosures, and oral arguments. We build open‑source tools like eyecite, juriscraper, and x-ray. We rely on your donations for our...
Michael Lissner February 14, 2017 The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing today on the topic of the “the effectiveness of the PACER service and use of audio and video recordings of courtroom procedures.” Three witnesses were invited by the committee to speak at the hearing, including our board member, Thomas Bruce, who spoke at length on the topic of...
Michael Lissner February 15, 2017 EMERYVILLE, CA — Free Law Project is proud to announce that it has been selected by researchers at Georgia State University to provide PACER data for their research on employment misclassification lawsuits. The purpose of their research is to gain an understanding of how courts distinguish between employees and independent...