I had a long chat with Sam Glover on the Lawyerist podcast a few weeks ago and it’s going live today! Have a listen to hear us talk about PACER fees, open legal data, the PACER lawsuit, and the challenges of running an open data non-profit like Free Law Project.

The Integrated Database provided by the Federal Judicial Center is one of the best-kept secrets in the world of legal information. Updated quarterly, it has metadata about every case in PACER (and many that are not), including civil, criminal, and bankruptcy cases. If the case is in PACER, this is often the only way to get in-depth metadata about it short of carefully reading the docket. The IDB is a treasure trove of data for researchers, litigants, and the public.

We are proud to share that we have begun integrating the IDB into our dockets on CourtListener. This is the first time we know of that the IDB data has been united with data from PACER data in an easily accessible way.

This project was made possible through generous support from one of our sponsors.

View a Live Example

So far we have integrated the IDB civil data set, so when you look at civil dockets on CourtListener, you will see a new tab like this:

On the tab, only partially shown above, there are 28 new fields about the case. These include things like whether the case was disposed (and in favor of whom), whether it was a class …

This year we hosted legal documents from the most important cases in the country. Many of these documents are of historical significance, like the sentencing memos for Michael Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor, and Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer. Others are less important, but still popular, like the SEC taking Elon Musk to task for making materially false statements about Tesla.

Whatever the case though, without exception, the top ten downloaded documents have to do, in one form or another, with either Tesla or Trump.

Here are the top ten downloaded legal documents from the RECAP Archive in 2018:

1. MOTION to Revoke or Revise Order of Pretrial Release from U.S. v. Paul Manafort

2. Class Action Complaint from Doe v. The Trump Corporation

3. CONSENT MOTION FOR ENTRY OF FINAL JUDGMENT from SEC v. Elon Musk

4. Answer to Complaint from Tesla v. Martin Tripp

5. Government’s Submission in Support of its Breech Determination from U.S. v. Paul Manafort

6. Sentencing Memorandum from U.S. v. Michael Flynn

7. ORDER from Democratic National Committee v. The Russian Federation

   This is a fax in Russian and English from the “Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation” claiming immunity from the lawsuit.

8. Sentencing …

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a sweeping new data protection and privacy law out of the EU. One of the things the GDPR includes is the ability of EU citizens to send “Right to Erasure” requests to websites, asking that those websites remove content that might be private. Recently, we received one of these requests from our domain registrar asking that we remove a court document from our database on CourtListener. It appears that this is a growing problem for other legal publishers too, with techdirt doing a write up of the issue late last week:

GDPR Being Used To Try To Disappear Public US Court Docket https://t.co/PlXcm0wl4n

— techdirt (@techdirt) September 21, 2018

GDPR is a major development in the regulation of the Internet. It includes protections for individuals and a variety of regulations that apply to service providers like us. When GDPR went into effect, we were easily able to comply with its numerous privacy regulations because we were already being extremely conservative about who we shared data with and how much data we collected (see our privacy policy for details). For us, adopting compatible procedures with the GDPR just meant a few tweaks — no big deal.

Until last week that is, when we received a “Right to Erasure” request demanding that we remove a case from CourtListener. Now we have an EU regulation that’s at odds with our goal of gathering and sharing important legal information. What’s worse, if we complied with this request, we would be removing precedential information from CourtListener. Our policy is to never do that without a court order from a competent jurisdiction. In short, this take down request is at odds with our goals — and with the design of the American legal system.

So where do we bend? Who wins in this conflict between us, the GDPR, and the individual wishing to remove content from CourtListener? What follows is our approach to responding to this kind of request. The short version is that we won’t comply. We don’t believe we are subject to the GDPR, and even if we were, it has numerous carve outs specifically for the kind of information we provide.

Read on for the details of our approach.

At Free Law Project, we collect a lot of legal information. In our RECAP initiative, we collect (or are donated) around one hundred thousand items from PACER every day. Separately, in our collection of oral argument recordings, we have gathered more than 1.4 million minutes of legal recordings — more than anywhere else on the web. All of this content comes from a variety of sources, and we merge it all together to make a searchable collection of PACER dockets and a huge archive of oral argument recordings.

Part of our mission at Free Law Project is to share this information and to ensure its long-term distribution and preservation. A great way to do that is to give it to a neutral third party so that no matter what happens, the information will always be available. For years, we have been lucky to partner with the Internet Archive for this purpose and today we are pleased to share two pieces of news about how we give them information. more ...

Make Alerts Now

Today we are thrilled to announce the general availability of PACER Docket Alerts on CourtListener.com. Once enabled, a docket alert will send you an email whenever there is a new filing in a case in PACER. We started CourtListener in 2010 as a circuit court monitoring tool, and we could not be more excited to continue expanding on those roots with this powerful new tool.

The best way to get started with Docket Alerts is to just make one. Try loading a popular case like U.S. v. Manafort or The District of Columbia v. Trump. Once the case is open, just press the “Get Alerts” button near the top. Then, just wait for your first alert.

We believe PACER Docket Alerts will be a valuable resource to journalists, researchers, lawyers, and the public as they grapple with staying up to date with the latest PACER filings.

Our goal with docket alerts is to make them as simple as possible to use. Once you have found a case you are interested in, a single click is all it takes to turn on an alert for that docket. From then on, we will send you an email …

A few weeks ago I had the privilege and the pleasure of speaking at the Michigan Association of Law Librarians (MichALL) annual conference. The talk I gave was an overview of Free Law Project and all of our projects, initiatives, and advocacy. Here are the slides from that presentation.

The original RECAP extension for Firefox was launched eight years ago. Today we launch an all new version. Since the original launch in 2009, we’ve kept the system running smoothly, added a Chrome extension, and — with your help — collected and shared information about tens of millions of PACER documents.

Today we’re announcing the future of RECAP. If you’re an existing Firefox or Chrome user, you should automatically get this update over the next 24 hours. If you’re a new user, just learning about RECAP, you can find links for Firefox or Chrome on the right, and you can learn more on the RECAP homepage.

Add to Chrome  Add to Firefox 

As this new system rolls out, these are the big changes:

1. As you’re using PACER, the extensions will stop providing links to the Internet Archive, and will instead provide links to CourtListener and the RECAP Archive, where dockets and documents are fully text searchable.

2. Links to CourtListener will be available very soon after an upload from PACER is complete — possibly within seconds or minutes. This has been the most-requested enhancement we’ve heard over the years, and we’re really happy to be bringing this …

Today we’re proud to announce that Ansel Halliburton has joined the Free Law Project Board of Directors. Ansel has already been contributing to Free Law Project for several years, and his experience as both a practicing lawyer and legal technologist will help steer us into the future.

Ansel has been involved in legal technology since 2006, when he joined a team at Stanford Law School to help build a comprehensive database of all federal intellectual property litigation. Now a lawyer, Ansel practices technology law in San Francisco. Ansel holds degrees from UC Berkeley and UC Davis School of Law, writes about technology and security for Lawyerist, and builds small robots.

Board members are selected for terms lasting two years.

“We couldn’t be more delighted to welcome Ansel to the board,” stated Free Law Project Executive Director Michael Lissner. “Ansel brings the kinds of knowledge, experience, and smart thinking that will be invaluable to Free Law Project over the next few years.”

You can read more on our Board of Directors page and you can learn more about what it means to be a member of the board in our bylaws.

At Free Law Project, we have gathered millions of court documents over the years, but it’s with distinct pride that we announce that we have now completed our biggest crawl ever. After nearly a year of work, and with support from the U.S. Department of Labor and Georgia State University, we have collected every free written order and opinion that is available in PACER. To accomplish this we used PACER’s “Written Opinion Report,” which provides many opinions for free.

This collection contains approximately 3.4 million orders and opinions from approximately 1.5 million federal district and bankruptcy court cases dating back to 1960. More than four hundred thousand of these documents were scanned and required OCR, amounting to nearly two million pages of text extraction that we completed for this project.

All of the documents amassed are available for search in the RECAP Archive of PACER documents and via our APIs. New opinions will be downloaded every night to keep the collection up to date.

With this additional collection, the RECAP Archive now has information about more than twenty million PACER documents.

As a backup and permanent repository, we are continuing our partnership with the Internet …

PACER/ECF is a system of 204 websites that is run by the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO) for the management of federal court documents. The main function of PACER/ECF is for lawyers and the public to upload and download court documents such as briefs, memos, orders, and opinions.

In February we reported that we disclosed a major vulnerability in PACER/ECF to the AO. The proof of concept and disclosure/resolution timeline are available here.

We are pleased to share that this issue is now properly addressed, and that we are now able to report more details about it. Throughout the process of researching, disclosing, and resolving this vulnerability, the AO has been prompt and professional, something that we greatly appreciate given the considerable constraints and complexities they are facing. However, despite their skill in dealing with this issue, after discovering it we have lingering concerns about the security of PACER/ECF on the whole.

In this post, we discuss three topics. First, we outline what the vulnerability was and how to identify if you were a victim of it. Second, we discuss why the vulnerability is troubling for a system of PACER/ECF’s size and …

Today, we’re celebrating another milestone. We now have more than a million minutes of oral argument audio in CourtListener.com’s oral argument archive. All of this audio is available in our search engine, APIs, podcasts, and our website.

A million minutes of oral argument audio is a lot, so it helps to contextualize it. This is nearly 700 days of continuous oral argument audio from nearly thirty thousand cases. Put another way, listening to this entire collection would take as long as watching every episode of The Simpsons 76 times.

We have had a lot of success with our oral argument archive, and we’re thrilled to be able to provide it at no cost, despite its size growing every day.

In the coming months we will continue expanding this collection in two key ways. First, we plan to begin automatically generating transcripts for audio files so that you can get an email alert any time certain words are said in court. Second, we plan to continue expanding our coverage so that it includes more state courts, and so that it includes all of the federal courts that have recordings available.

Between these two initiatives, we will continue …

Today, the PACER system contains millions of court filings for the federal district, circuit, and bankruptcy courts, most of which are sold at a dime per page with a three dollar cap per document. But content in PACER was not always priced this way, and indeed the PACER system goes back all the way to the early 1990’s, before computers were generally connected to the Internet.

Fees for using PACER are set by the Judicial Conference of the Administrative Office of the Courts, which scrupulously keeps notes from its bi-annual proceedings going back to its creation in 1922. In this post, we have gone through all of the relevant proceedings, and we present what we believe is a complete history of PACER fees and changes.

During the 27 year history outlined below, technology has changed significantly, and the Administrative Office of the Courts has done its best to keep up. Over the years, PACER has offered a variety of ways to get court information. These include a 1-900 number, a search service available via a regular phone call, the ability to connect your own computer directly to the courts’, and the websites that we know today.

But regardless of …

We have a small update to share today, as we’ve wrapped up adding thousands of historical Supreme Court citations to our collection. These are the original citations for the Supreme Court from 1754 to 1874, from before when the United States Reports had begun. Previously we had many of these citations, but as of today we can say we have historical citations for our entire SCOTUS collection.

For the unfamiliar, Supreme Court citations were originally named after the Reporter of Decisions for the Supreme Court from the time the opinion was published. For example, the first person to do this was Alexander Dallas, and his citations start at 1 Dall. 1 (1754), and go forward to 4 Dall. 446 (1806). After Dallas came a long line of other reporters, each of whom named their series of books after himself until 1875, when congress began appropriating money for the full time creation of these reporters and demanded they be called the “United States Reports.”

A snapshot of 18 Stat. 204 (1874), which allocated $25,000 to the Supreme Court for printing (about $557,100 today).

At that time, 91 U.S. 1 was the first case to be born with …

Today we are launching a new project to download all of the free opinions and orders that are available on PACER. Since we do not want to unduly impact PACER, we are doing this process slowly, giving it several weeks or months to complete, and slowing down if any PACER administrators get in touch with issues.

In this project, we expect to download millions of PDFs, all of which we will add to both the RECAP Archive that we host, and to the Internet Archive, which will serve as a publicly available backup.¹ In the RECAP Archive, we will be immediately parsing the contents of all the PDFs as we download them. Once that is complete we will extract the content of scanned documents, as we have done for the rest of the collection.

This project will create an ongoing expense for Free Law Project—hosting this many files costs real money—and so we want to explain two major reasons why we believe this is an important project. The first reason is because there is a monumental value to these documents, and until now they have not been easily available to the public. These documents are a critical …

Today we are launching party, attorney, and firm search for the RECAP Archive of PACER documents. This unlocks powerful new ways to do your research.

For example, consider the following queries:

• Cases where Apple Computer is a party
  • …and they’re represented by Latham & Watkins
  • …that took place in the Eastern District of Texas
  • …and have a nature of suit code containing “patent”
  • …and that mention the term “radio” anywhere in a document
  • …including only motions

Click any of the above queries to see how they were made.

To use this new feature, type the name of the party or attorney into the fields on the RECAP Archive homepage or in the sidebar to the left of any search results. These boxes also accept advanced query syntax, and there are several new fields that can be queried from the main search box including party, attorney, and firm.

For example, in the main box you can search for attorney:”eric holder”~2 firm:covington. This query shows the cases where the attorney has the word “Eric” within two words of “Holder” (thus allowing his middle name) which were handled at the firm “Covington & Burling”.

A search for Eric X Holder while …

Recently, as part of our routine business practices, we discovered what we believe is a major vulnerability in the PACER system of websites that we believe affects both the electronic case filing and public access portals.

At this time, as part of a responsible disclosure process, we have notified the appropriate parties at The Administrative Office of the Courts, the agency that runs PACER. According to industry norms, we have given them a broad 90 day window to resolve the vulnerability.

After the 90 days are up or the issue is resolved, we plan to publish the details of what we discovered, the ramifications of the discovery, and the solution that they have put in place, if any.

Further questions about the vulnerability can be directed to our contact form where you can find our GPG key, if needed.

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 contractors, and the factors influencing those decisions across federal jurisdictions. This research will be funded by a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, and will be conducted by primary researchers Charlotte S. Alexander and Mohammad Javad Feizollahi of Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business.

Free Law Project’s role in this grant will be to acquire court opinions and orders from PACER, and to provide them to Alexander and Feizollahi for their research. Because PACER is not optimized for automated access, a key outcome of the grant will be to develop tools and infrastructure to enable other researchers to utilize PACER data through future grants.

“PACER data is too difficult for researchers to access, and it’s high time that a centralized service be created by a non-profit to gather this kind of data for researchers,” says Michael Lissner, Founder and Executive Director of …

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 reforming the PACER system. His written testimony can be found here.

Bruce framed his testimony by providing an overview of the things that PACER is and is not. In his words, these are the characteristics that define PACER:

1. First, PACER charges fees for access to public records.
2. Second, PACER became outmoded two years after it was built, and in some ways has never caught up.
3. Third, PACER suffers from a split personality. On one hand, it is an electronic filing and case management system that supports the Federal courts […]On the other […] it is a data publishing system that offers the work of the Federal courts, both documents and metadata, to a very wide range of people[…]

And these are the things, in his words, that it is not:

1. It is not transparent in its business model or operations.
2. PACER is not an adequate facility …

Free Law Project is proud to share that in our effort to create the most complete online collection of opinions, today we added 24 Attorney General advisory opinions relating to the Emoluments Clause and dating from 1952 to 2009. Attorney General advisory opinions are written by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, and provide legal advice to the President and all the Executive Branch agencies.

The opinions we added today were made available to Politico in 2012 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, and were recently published on their website. Included in the opinions is a range of advisory guidance on topics ranging from whether Nixon could accept anonymous donations to pay for his taxes to whether President Obama could accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

As with all of the opinions on CourtListener, we have completed OCR on these opinions, and their contents are immediately available for search, bulk download, and via our APIs. Free Law Project is proud to include these in CourtListener.com’s collection of over 1,000 Attorney General advisory opinions, making it the most complete collection of Attorney General advisory opinions available.